What Are You Playing This Week? November 06, 2023 edition

Backpack battles, path of exile, just bought kenshi and I'm looking to invest some time into it.

Xbox I've got stranded deep and gunk (or some synonym puzzle platformer that starts with a G) from the games pass.

Stranded deep seems like a very basic survival game, I was shocked how much like BioShock it started, it didn't give me hope for future creativity. I'm not sure if I'm getting old, or is they just expect extreme precision in doing things like putting the oar into the oar-locks, that simple task definitely tested my patience.

The gunk game was pretty fun, but the story is a bit gnawingly cliche, and there's some pretty easy continuity sequence breaking I managed to do by mistake. It also seems to require a masterful level of scrounging to get even a portion of the upgrades that you're naturally accumulating along the way, and the discrepancy of upgrade costs between the required and optional upgrades is verging on silly. But it is very pretty, and not at all difficult for my old man reflexes. The game designers seem confused about the reason map areas are separated by caves that you have to crouch through, as those "seemless loading corridors" exist, but they're put into areas that don't seem to need extra assets loaded, and then the maps are divided into areas separated by loading screens anyways. But that's a minor gripe.

Backpack battles introduced some much needed recipe balance to the system, 1 is the 2 classes got their omega pet that the other one has had for quite a while, it required the introduction of a sub pet (the carrot Goober), but imo that pet is so damn week compared to the ingredients that go into it, it definitely needs a little bit of a buff, but props to the developer for adding new items that aren't game breaking and then tuning them up.

Hopefully work doesn't kill me this week (a serious concern with my developing long COVID symptoms) so I can take some time to scratch the surface of kenshi.