I think this is why it never quite clicked with me. It’s a gorgeous game and it’s really come such a long way, but personally I could use a bit more direction.

Silksong surprise dropped this September after 7 years with like a 2 month heads up

Clair Obscur Expedition 33 came out of absolutely nowhere and is a work of art in every way

Deltarune chapters 3 and 4 finally launched, 3 is fun but 4 is incredible.

I think Balatro came out in that timeframe, and CloverPit in a similar vein this year (though the latter’s most recent update is frankly terrible and hopefully most of the charges will be reverted in the next update)

Ball X Pit becomes more of an idle game once you make progress, but it’s a great little casual take on Breakout, with a fair bit of grinding for completion.

Eden Ring Nightreign is an interesting take on the formula and IMO a far better game than its original counterpart

Alan Wake 2 may have been 2023, my memory’s a bit fuzzy, but I think if anything they dropped a decent sized update last year.

Mycopunk is a fantastic early access FPS, coop emphasis and super chaotic

Path of Exile 2’s early access is phase is finally nearing its end. Game has solid bones

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is pretty underrated, first modern game in the series that builds on the classic NES formula instead

Antonblast is a great little Wario-inspired platformer. Not as speedy as Pizza Tower, but really tight.

Yakuza Pirates I guess, though I’d argue it’s legitimately the worst game in the franchise. It’s not bad but it’s not good.

Witchfire is another early access FPS about to hit 1.0. It’s been out for a few years now but they’ve been really cracking down on the updates lately.

I Am Your Beast is an underrated one for sure, very fast paced speedrun-driven FPS about taking down a fascist private military. Strange Scaffold never disappoints.

These couple years saw a huge resurgence of casual party-based games. Lethal Company, REPO, and Peak are all fun with the right group, though popularity of the first two is dwindling last I checked. A bit of a fad but they’re fun.

I’ve definitely missed a handful here and got my years wrong in some places, but these have been some standouts for me lately.

I love the new area, I do think the bosses are a bit overtuned (especially the two new superbosses, but those should be a huge challenge), but I was also super rusty and on NG+5 so I can’t really say for certain.

Super cool stuff. All 5 new bosses kicked my shit in after I’d been steamrolling the rest of the game, only beat the new area boss and called it there - the new tower shit is way too much for me. Might edit my save back down to NG+ and see how they feel.

Not a fan of the Breaking Death nerf though, I will say that. It really cripples endgame autodeath builds. One of those changes where even if it were a bug, it’d been around so long that they should’ve let it stay as-is.

It feels like so many devs and studios have been trying to bring back the magic of that era but L4D was such a product of the times. Hard to imagine any similar games in that vein succeeding today.

After ditching D2 last year well past the 10k hour mark, I’ve been bouncing around a bunch of different games, mostly working through the backlog but also looking for a long-term grind to scratch that same itch. Out of everything I’ve tried, PoE2 and Warframe feel like the only ones doing live service “right”, especially the latter. Between both games, the only MTX gripe I have is PoE2’s stash tabs.

Last Epoch had a ton of potential but the team were in way over their heads and forced to start cashing in, and the Krafton buyout was the nail in the coffin. It feels like they just flat out didn’t have the budget to keep it going.

As soon as Krafton bought them out it wasn’t just downhill from there, it was a steep drop off a cliff. The game had so much promise but got royally fucked.

Everything is cosmetic last I checked aside from stash tabs, which granted should be earnable in-game, but it’s nothing like an entirely MTX-only class. I do wish the game had a transmog system though at least, even Diablo 4 does, and we all know how Blizzard is.

Could be better, could be worse.

For a bit it was Destiny Rising, I quit D2 over a year ago but DR does genuinely do a lot of things much better than the base game and directly addresses a lot of my core complaints that made me quit after 10k hours in the first place. Stupid mobile gacha game with predatory monetization out the ass, and I was shrugging aside the handful of AI NPC voicelines.

Needless to say I came to my senses and dropped it entirely on a whim. Can’t support the AI bullshit, I found I’d spent much more than I thought on the game already, and the endgame is entirely just p2w or get a handful of mats you need every 2 weeks. The core of the game and a lot of the systems are legitimately really good, but the gacha core really brings it way down.

That entire franchise is just a warehouse full of monkey paws.

I recently picked up Warframe which I’ve shrugged off for a long time because TPS almost never clicks for me, but it pulled me in hard, and it’s wild going from FOMO-ridden powercrept anti-player D2 and gacha hell DR to a game that actually treats the players with respect.

You know at first I didn’t really think it would be considered one, but looking back you’re absolutely right. I really need to replay those games.

I love how so many of these old games has custom servers up and running. Metroid Prime Hunters apparently has a thriving community too (though I left the biggest discord as soon as I joined because it looks the lead admin is literally a DHS nazi 💀)

The bigger hurdle really is the DS’s wifi compatibility since WEP is so outdated and insecure. I haven’t actually messed with it in ages, but seems like hotspots are the way to go and are super easy to set up on linux, so maybe I’ll dust mine off and give that a try.

Probably

Considering how much Bungie has fucked over their one game and its playerbase for years and seem to keep finding ways to double down on it, I never had any faith in Marathon from the beginning.

What’s wild is this is far from the first time that studio’s been caught for art theft too.

Tbh the marketing and price tag are what killed it. The game itself was actually pretty fun, played a lot like Destiny 1 pvp and really didn’t feel like a hero shooter at all (which is a good thing). The abilities complemented the gunplay, not the other way around, and movement was crisp.

Firewalk had a great core, but Sony fucked it up.

A bit of a tangent, but tbh I feel like Half-Life Alyx was a perfect example of where they can take the franchise, but being a PC VR title (and one that really leans heavily into the tech and loses a ton if played with non-VR mods), it didn’t have nearly the same impact as the rest of the franchise. It was definitely innovative but not in a way to appeal to the mass market. Not to mention it sets the stage for HL3 even more than Ep 2 did.

I’ve started playing it and it hooked me for a bit but once it really opens up I’ve been struggling to stick with it. Very interesting premise and characters so far though, I have no idea who can actually be trusted and that feels intentional.

If it were more linear akin to their older games and dramatically reduced the visual clutter of most bosses, it would’ve been perfect, but those two things brought it way down imo. These sorts of games excel in smaller, more linear but interconnected environments.

Nine Sols. Played it right after finishing Silksong to keep the metroidvania kick going.

The parrying was some of the worst feeling parrying I’ve ever felt in any game, the world felt tiny and extremely linear, the narrative was predictable and felt extremely flat, and the final boss is the only time I’ve ever switched to a story mode difficulty in any game just to get it over with, I love difficult games but that difficulty spike is absurd and the game never remotely prepares you for that.

They advertise this game as a Sekiro-like metroidvania, while it feels like they completely miss what made Sekiro work or what a metroidvania is.

This is something that gets completely lost in the translation to an open world game. The DS trilogy, Bloodborne, and even the original Demon’s Souls feel hand-crafted and carefully structured without being completely linear. ER loses a lot by leaving that formula behind.

On top of that, the boss/enemy design is imo some of the worst they’ve ever done. The past games (with DS2 being the one with the most exceptions) typically give you very fair but challenging fights. Telegraphs are clear without being slow and obvious. Particle effects and such are generally kept to a minimum to prevent visual clutter from taking over the screen. Bosses hit hard, but very few hits or combos, if any, would one-shot most builds outside of challenge runs. ER throws all of that out the window - bosses tend to hit like trucks, are visual clusterfucks (either enormous models with a terrible camera, tons of particle effects blasting out the ass, or both). I feel like the final boss of the DLC as an example is the most egregious example of this sort of design philosophy. Hell, Nightreign works so much better with the exact same designs because it’s such a faster-paced game where getting knocked down once or twice isn’t usually the end of a run.

I echoed this in another thread. I honestly feel like ER is the weakest “Soulsborne” game they’ve put out. It feels like a lot of conflicting design philosophies at once.

The lore and worldbuilding are phenomenal but gameplay-wise it falls short of what made their past games shine.

I bought it ages ago but finally decided go give it a go. From the first day I could tell it wasn’t gonna be a game for me. Note-taking is basically mandatory, and it seems so easy just to get fucked out of a run by RNG.

Narrative seemed interesting but I feel like the whole “ability to decide what room you’re going into” thing should be weaved into the story off the bat.

Neat concept but not for me, but I think since I’ve owned it for so long I’m outside of the refund window.

I’m in the camp of Soulsborne vets whose first AC game was AC6. Took me like 3 tries for it to click but it finally did, then I binged the hell out of it and platinumed it in a week. Phenomenal game and really got me interested in picking up the rest.

Tbh I need to replay 2, I can’t even remember if I actually finished it back in the day. Didn’t play 1 either, though I never really hear anyone talk about it, everyone goes straight to 2.

I do think 3 was really good, it was definitely a bit too much but they still made it work. 4 was where they took those ideas and went off the rails with it for some reason.

I was interested in the reboot until the feedback starting coming out and yeah I’m not touching that one

Seriously. SR3 was like a goofy spinoff. Then 4 happened.

Yeah honestly. Fuck Microsoft and all that but this sounds like there’s a strong reason behind it, and the owner’s post about “free speech” and “totalitarian China” is a MAJOR red flag.

Equally disgusting tbh. Boycott for life for sure.

Microsoft declining to comment may as well be a confession that they gave this shit the go-ahead

I hate the name so much. I’ll use it with games where artifacts aren’t noticeable and input delay is negligible, but I’d never pretend it’s “lossless”. Same goes for any other framegen method.

Seriously. I love GOS and can’t imagine using a phone without it at this point, but their social media is a shitshow and a half.

Yeah the entire game is basically AI slop. Hard pass.

The original Yakuza 1 and 2, though I’d recommend the Restored mods for each because the localizations (especially Y1’s dub) were notoriously awful. Hilarious at first, but that wears off fast. (Though it is so funny to me how Y7 dub Kiryu’s VA is the original VA from Y1, you’d think they would’ve wanted to forget that ever happened LOL)

When I first played the series I played the remakes first, and after going back and playing the originals I understood why so many series vets weren’t happy with the remakes. Y2 especially has some of the best feeling combat in the franchise.

Absolutely. Still holds up extremely well in every aspect.

Nazis deserve no sympathy.

I sunk 90 hours into Silksong since launch, and now I’m going through Nine Sols and playing PoE2 on and off. I won’t lie I’m hearing good things about BL4 minus the performance, but I’m not giving Randy a single cent and I’m far happier not engaging in AAA dogshit.

$40 per game apparently LOL

Not sure yet. They did say they were small so probably nothing too egregious, I’d imagine a contact damage nerf if anything.

Splinter is an odd choice to update at all but w/e, Moorwing I felt was tough but fair and really forces the player to learn the fundamentals.

Humble Bundle’s been kinda dogshit for years now and this one’s no exception.

Really don’t think the boss nerfs were warranted at all but the environmental damage change is very welcome.

Capitalism

HK can be trivialized pretty early on by stacking charms and upgrades. Silksong spaces out meaningful upgrades in a way that really forces you to learn the ins and outs of the game before you can start buildcrafting.

FWIW, all the final bosses are easier than HK’s true final boss. The difficulty scaling starts with a rough curve but evens out over time.

This is exactly it. I think the game is a goddamn masterpiece. The most infuriating fights feel like huge accomplishments, not just relief. Phenomenal game all around, but that difficulty curve isn’t for everyone. I can say the same about any Soulsborne game, love them to death but it’s definitely too much for some folks. Difficulty options are a good thing, if a compromise has to be made just have it disable achievements or w/e.