Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of June 30th

Stardew Valley + Stray + Dead cells + Ori and the Blind Forest, all on my Steam Deck.

Yes I play multiple games in case I get bored. No, I don't have ADHD.

CrossCode, for the third time in about two weeks.

I'm 5 years late to it because for some reason I thought it was a JRPG...

Frostpunk - seems fun. Played a few hours.

Armored core 6 - um I died like 4 times in the tutorial. I was shamed and put it down.

But ya - it’s been Elden ring pretty much 90% of the time.

I have only four more objectives to finish the season journey in Diablo 4: Season 4. Right now I'm balancing between running through nightmare dungeons to level up my glyphs and taking on Helltides.

I finished the main story line for Mad Max and only have to clean up the rest of the map. But I won't do that now, will probably just pop in every few days to do stuff.

Still Wakes The Deep came out recently, and I didn't know much about it other than it takes place on an ocean oil rig near Scotland and is Lovecraftian in nature. I was really looking forward to it, because usually Lovecraftian games center around a detective MC, so this taking place on an oil rig seemed like a refreshing concept, but I ended up extremely disappointed. It started off like Amnesia meets The Thing meets Alien Isolation, but unlike Amnesia, there's not any puzzles. And unlike Alien Isolation, there's not any combat or action. Just go here, pull lever, sneak there, have a little chase, flail through awful QTEs (and jesus, there were a lot of them). It made for a very boring ride with bland and shallow story where nothing is explained. The accents were fun though.

I picked up Subnautica again. I'm determined to actually finish it this time. I think my issue in my previous attempts was spending too much time working on building a massive base, so my plan is to just build necessities this round. I think it's working so far? Right now all I have is a moonpool with some storage, a fabricator, and a med station. I'm not sure how long to "story" is, but I feel like I'm making good progress.

Still Pokemon Red. I'm beginning to regret my choices. The choice to include Blue-exclusives, and trade evolutions, because PKHex makes it so easy to do. The choice to try to keep a selection of various typings caught up in level, so I'd have some decent coverage versus brute forcing.

Having the trio of starters. I think I've grown to hate Bulbasaur, at this point. Every time I go to drop him into my party, all I can remember is "Not very effective", over and over again. Well into the 20s, still taking 2-3 Vine Whips to take out a level 6 Kakuna.

Just finished last boss of erdtree. That one needs some serious tuning- some of the moves are far too powerful and annoying. Unsure if I want to roll another character since it's been so long since I played through the game. Spent some amount of hours in coop helping others after beating it since I don't really have another game on deck right now. Missed out on a fair deal of DLC quests and storylines because I didn't read everything before my first run through, I could reboot a save pre-DLC and respec into something completely different and then play through it instead of a fresh character I guess.

Just finished the new Riven remake, pretty cool game, now continuing High on Life, and Ghostwire Tokio

Got some stuff in my cart, but need to play some demos first before I hit the "buy" button. Surprisingly quite a few games I'm interested in have one available, which is nice.

In the meantime, I've started Case of the Golden Idol because I loved Return of the Obra Dinn and I know it's highly recommended for fans of that.

Don't know if I'm really feeling this as much, though. I'll carry on, of course, because I still enjoy the detective puzzle aspect. But it isn't drawing me in the way Obra Dinn did for some reason.

I've been working my way through the Baldur's Gate series after putting about ninety hours in BG3. BG1 was fun even if the story was a bit predictable and generic, although it did feel like playing through a DnD campaign. Really enjoyed Shadows of Amn, but Throne of Bhaal just turned into a slog at the end. I think the most interesting part of playing through the trilogy was watching Bioware's style develop over the course of the three games. As someone who was introduced to Bioware through Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire I've always thought Bioware's character writing stood out, especially in the old days, so it was a bit jarring to play through BG1 where the companions feel more like hirelings you pick up for their class rather than full-fledged characters. BG2 felt more like a classic Bioware game with banter, romance, and companion quests, although the Real Time advancement system kept glitching out on me. I was hoping to move on to Planescape: Torment after TOB, but I'm feeling burnt out on Infinity Engine games. So right now I'm trying to find something in the Summer Sale to serve as a palate cleanser.

7 Days To Die. It may have taken them 10 years, but the game is pretty solid now. This release has a huge number of quality of life changes, fixes and is extremely performant compared to many previous alphas. Great fun with friends.

Been playing a lot of Destiny 2 lately! Having a lot of fun with smgs in crucible

• Single player (desktop): After finishing Red Faction Guerrilla, and trying Red Faction Armageddon but not really liking it, I settled on Just Cause 2 (again). Still as much fun as in 2013, when I last played it.
• Single player (Deck): more Deep Rock Galactic:Survivor.
• Co-op (desktop): Deep Rock Galactic, if my co-op buddies don't bail, that is.

Picked up Bloons Tower Defence 6 on sale for $1.50, already put quite a few hours into it.

Excited to dive into the entire Kingdom Hearts series. Previously only played KH2 on the PS2.

Technically I'm still playing "Vagrus - The Riven Realms", but I didn't play much lately, since I rediscovered my love for the Lean4 programming language and am now playing around with a formally validated heap again.

Persona 3 Reload - I'm not sure whether I like it or not just yet tbh. I'm about 20 hours in (or 2 months of "in-game time") and the plot is very slow to unravel.
I don't like turn-based RPGs usually, so combat is a bit of a chore and the exploration of Tartarus is very samey. Social sim aspects have been fine, but I guess I expected a bit more interactivity? I'm not sure. Its been nice to learn more about side characters, albeit ones not present in the "core" team.
The only somewhat similar game I've played before is Fire Emblem: Three Houses and I absolutely loved it, but I was much more interested in the gameplay (T-RPGs are 100% up my alley) and social sim was okay as well.
I think my primary issue with P3R is the setting - which I didn't think would matter so much - I really don't relate to high school life / issues anymore and it's making it hard for me to get into the game...
The OST is absolutely S-tier though (and it has made exploring Tartarus much more bearable!)

Playing The Finals consistently, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. It is such a fun puzzle game, and I have enjoyed many hours playing it.

During the Steam summer sale, I picked up Viewfinder, Riven remaster, and Children of the Sun.

Finally managed to kick my current World of Warcraft addiction, or at least massively cut my time with the Remix mode. I did level a new character yesterday, just to get them to max level, but that was pretty much it. There are a few more I plan to level, but I'll take my time with those, maybe one a week. XP needed for max level is supposed to be slashed soon, because of the new expansion, so the already short level time should be even shorter.

I'm also done with the Diablo 4 season. I didn't enjoy playing Minion Necromancer at all, and couldn't be bothered to grind for a different build. Just like the last few times, I finished the Season Journey, and killed one of the new giga versions of the bosses (Tormented Duriel), although I needed help with that. The next season is supposed to start soon-ish (4-5 weeks or something), so I'll take a break until then and hopefully choose something I enjoy more.

Went back to Dave the Diver, did just one dive, but didn't really feel it. My extended break with the game really killed my enthusiasm. I might try again here or there, but who knows. There are so many other games I want to try, this might just be it for Dave.

Started Crab Champions, a roguelike shooter, based on the Crab Rave song (I guess). It's in Early Access, fun for a couple of hours, but lacks variety, so it can get boring relatively quickly. I'll wait for some more updates or the full release. This game also has multiplayer, so I gotta convince some of my friends to get it, since that's always more fun.