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[Jopax]

Tower Dominion, essentially a tower defense game with some neat twists and elements. Not doing anything terribly new, merely remixing what works, and oh boy does it remix well. It's been out for a couple of days and I've already sunk in almost 15 hours, and that's with me being out for most of said couple of days.

[Il Palazzo]

I've been sinking way too many hours into Zephon, a combat-focused 4x. It's my understanding that it's essentially the same game as Gladius 40k, only with a reskin of original lore, and maybe some improvements/adjustments/modernisations here and there.
All the mechanics are good to great, but it's the lore that hooked me in. You lead one of the few surviving groups of humans in a bleak post-apocalypse with runaway military AI and stranded Cthulhu-worshipping alien invaders fighting each other and everybody else in a giant free for all on a ruined world. The details are doled out sparingly, and you sort of have to piece the picture together as you go. I kinda dig it.

[EuchreJack]

Caves of Qud is absolutely an experience.

I'm not sure what exactly it is you do in the game. Do you get quests and try to complete them?

Yeah, nobody knows. 

[Akura]

Kingdoms and Castles just released an update, giving access to the late-game ability to tame dragons. I haven't played since before the addition of AI kingdoms.

...Pretty sure that despite setting them to easy, I think I'm already way behind.

[Yoink]

Just started a new Rimworld game (not that there was anything wrong with my ongoing one) and happened to get a bunch of randomised starting pawns I really like. Actually it made me chuckle - two of them are lovely, "kind" people with mostly non-combat skills, then there's the woman's husband, a terrifying "bloodgame survivor" with 17 melee skill who is a brawler, misogynist and a teetotaller - so I can't even give him drugs to keep him happy, which is basically half the Rimworld playbook as far as I'm aware.   
I really wanna see how their story plays out but this is like, the shittiest planet I've ever generated, the whole thing's basically a desert wasteland (I usually play in rainforests or rainforest-adjacent biomes with shitloads of trees), and to cap it off I chose commitment mode. Oh jeez. This should be fun. Did I mention I am Not Very Good at this game?!

Edit: hahaha our first transport crash was an ex-lover of hers, who for some reason decided to join our hardscrabble little settlement upon recovering from his smashed pelvis. I know ex-lover doesn't mean much beyond a social debuff in this game, but I'm imagining him trying to rekindle an old flame here... who knows if that transport pod really even landed here by accident.   

I've been sinking way too many hours into Zephon, a combat-focused 4x. It's my understanding that it's essentially the same game as Gladius 40k, only with a reskin of original lore, and maybe some improvements/adjustments/modernisations here and there.
All the mechanics are good to great, but it's the lore that hooked me in. You lead one of the few surviving groups of humans in a bleak post-apocalypse with runaway military AI and stranded Cthulhu-worshipping alien invaders fighting each other and everybody else in a giant free for all on a ruined world. The details are doled out sparingly, and you sort of have to piece the picture together as you go. I kinda dig it.

That setting does sound pretty sweet, actually. Kinda reminds me of a forum game I was involved with here years back.   


Edit 2: PLOT TWIST! I didn't even look at his sheet at first but her ex-lover is apparently gay. So many possible explanations here... anyway, I can't imagine dear sweet Zornie driving someone to homosexuality, so perhaps they dated before he went gay or maybe she was his "beard". Who knows. In other news, our other starting colonist (whom I was also very fond of) was killed by a fluke revolver shot from some pirate that attacked us. FUCK! We have also been forced to resort to cannibalism, something I usually am more able to avoid than most players. Ran out of things to kill on the map and besides, one of our hunters was the dead one and the other is the bloodgame survivor who also took a bullet to the lung.
I blame combat extended. Smdh.

[nenjin]

Been playing Pentiment, by Obsidian Game Studios. KOTOR, Tyranny, Fallout New Vegas. These are RPG and storytelling people.

Pentiment is a mystery/story-driven game set in a town in the early 16th century, nearby to an abbey/monastery/convent.

It's a gorgeous game. Lovingly detailed, researched and animated. Builds a full cast of characters, their lives and the drama of a mystery that spans 25 years. A real thinker and reader's game.

And yet, near the end, I'm irritated.

Spoiler: No hard spoilers but just being cautious. (click to show/hide)

This isn't a mystery game. It's a narrative with a mystery attached. This game doesn't want you to solve a mystery even though that's what it sets up. In the vein of many well-known mystery-driven shows and games, Pentiment is forever baiting you with knowledge it doesn't deliver. It asks you to investigate this or go do that and there's rarely a pay off. Or rather, the pay off is in the dialog and character development of some people. But does it advance your understanding? Rarely.

The pacing in the first two acts is pretty good. Exciting even. Cool setting, getting to know the players, plenty of mystery, some dramatic choices.

Act 2 takes place years later. It's drabber, sadder, tenser. But you do some cool exploration and again are trying to solve a mystery that is frustratingly out of your reach. It ends on a huge, dramatic climax.

Act 3 takes place much much later. You're playing a different character. This character was a child during the events of Act 2. So what do you do? SPEND HALF YOUR TIME RE-LEARNING WHAT THE PLAYER ALREADY KNOWS. The conversations get tedious because they talk about the same story points over and over and over again. You get more time-wasting distractions that don't yield anything to the actual story. And you're less trying to solve the mystery and more trying to assemble the narrative of what the mystery was, decades later. Which the player already knows and STILL doesn't have an answer for. And of course, it dangles a couple fresh mysterious elements in Act 3 just so you don't give up hope you're going to learn SOMETHING. So you don't feel like you're doing purely historical research rather than actual clue and fact-finding.

The game's biggest sin IMO is that it created layers early on that make the answer to the "mystery" pointless. It goes to pains to make the biggest clues unhelpful. The process of elimination of suspects is thwarted when there may or may not be a conspiracy and the only things that can link the information to someone concrete by dint of what the game lets you know cannot connect to a concrete person you're aware of. It's basically "well the killer must actually be a mole person" sort of thing, because there's no actual way for you to solve any of the crimes or mysteries presented to you. You can guess at stuff, sure. But you can't know. And then they add the time element to it and you don't even really get the satisfaction of seeing justice served or wrongs-righted. Who cares what happened 25 years ago? Everyone involved is dead and everything is all fucked up because of it.

I want to recommend the game heartily for the style and the execution of so many elements. But as a mystery narrative it is frustratingly, intentionally unhelpful in solving anything. I don't feel like my intelligence is being insulted. But in retrospect I am starting to feel like like my time wasn't always respected, and it's kind of a struggle to make myself want to finish the game.

Again as I said, it's not a mystery game where the objective is to solve something. It's a narrative where you're supposed to "experience" a mystery and go through the motions of solving it while absorbing all the atmosphere and characterization. But you're not going to be solving shit really and that's super-duper irritating for a game that sells everything else so well.

[delphonso]

Star Ocear, Second Story R. It's just a really really really good remake of the original. Tons of QoL improvements, it looks stunning but also true to the original, and is perfectly nostalgic.

[Il Palazzo]

Tower Dominion, essentially a tower defense game with some neat twists and elements. Not doing anything terribly new, merely remixing what works, and oh boy does it remix well. It's been out for a couple of days and I've already sunk in almost 15 hours, and that's with me being out for most of said couple of days.

Hey, it's pretty neat! Terrible time sink, though.

[Jopax]

Yeah, as enjoyable as it is, there's certain things that could get improved. Rerolls on certain things for one, maybe a more engaging endgame mode while you're at it. Curious to see how/if they develop the game further as I can see more stuff being added to it, beyond just basic QoL or different modes.