The amount of fights wouldn't be so bad either if the encounter design wasn't so bad. Especially towards the endgame it just felt like Owlcat absolutely hate their players. Both HATEOT and the endgame sucked, and that's coming from someone who was earned beforehand to put Blind Fight on every single character. That being said there were parts I really enjoyed - the whole Vordakai arc was great I thought.
Shame to hear that about the story. That's the part that always made me hesitant about WotR too - I tend to prefer more grounded narratives over epic godslaying adventures.
Damn, very sad to hear WotR was a disappointment for you. I also had similarly mixed feelings about Kingmaker, but I was looking forward to WotR as everyone was saying it's so much better.
It has some really strong moments and a very powerful ending that means it leaves a very strong lasting impression in a lot of people. Also the music really carries it. I still think it's a good game, but I was definitely a victim of this too and have found that my esteem of it has fallen a little bit as the "dust has settled" so to speak.
It's still a great game, and I'd recommend people playing it but I don't think I'd rank it as highly on my all-time list now as I would have when I sat and watched the credits roll the first time.
Definitely grab this one, this was one of my surprise hits last year. Really fun, short, concise and well written tribute to retro RPGs. Great pixel art, fun enough turn based combat, some fun dice rolls in dialogue and a really cool gloomy setting with some cosmic horror undertones. Great music too.
Can't recommend it enough, especially for this price!
The game was made by communists, and they do make fun of themselves and other communists a lot and try to be even handed with the satire. That being said, if you've completed all four political vision quests you do notice how pro-communist the authors are. I always recommend people do the communist path on their first playthrough, because it is the political quest that injects a necessary piece of hope into the game. It feels almost like the "canon" choice considering how well it balances out certain other elements of the story.
Not only do you have some gorgeous lines in the book club about their motivations, like:
"I guess you could say we believe it because it's impossible." He looks at the scattered matchboxes on the ground. "It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this..."
But then the scene also ends with irrefutable proof that infra-materialism works. Ideas can change the world if you believe in them.
Mbin is just kinda weird. I guess there aren't too many people who are after a Reddit-like that also care too much about microblogging. Or maybe they do but the microblogging part of Mbin is just an inferior experience to Bluesky or Mastodon anyway? Or maybe people just dislike having to call shitposts in meme communities "articles" in "magazines"?
Probably the worst of the first four Splinter Cell games (ie: the "good ones"), but still a very solid game with great stealth. Absolutely worth this price.
Hah, pretty much! I actually also forgot it does 20% more damage to abyssal enemies just like Artorias sword does for lore reasons!
It does have some skill ceiling if you want to get really fancy, but it's easier than you think because enemies are input reading and they're not programmed to account for the rapid change in direction of that initial ground lunge. So you quickly get a feel for when to use it to make them miss.
It's not broken though, it's just really good and really fun. It is a UGS so the normal swings are slow, and it's also a kind of an awkward quality weapon with C/A scaling when maxed. And it can't be buffed/infused.
Not only are the combos sexy: the fact that you sweep down low on the floor and propel yourself forward while performing them means you can use them to dodge a lot of attacks by moving under or past the enemy hitbox! And they cost no FP, so you can spam them without investing in the blue bar.
Farron Greatsword is just the GOAT weapon imo, so much fun to use. And yeah, built in parry because why not.
Yeah it's a bit of a shame that Artorias is kind of not that hard. One of my dream games is a full Dark Souls 1 remake where they keep the world as-is, finish the areas in the last third where they ran out of money and time and just threw shit together and upgrade the bosses to modern FromSoft DS3/ER level movesets.
Something like that would be near-lethal doses of absolute cinema.
DS3 is great, you should definitely play it! Well, Road of Sacrifices and the obligatory Miyazaki-says-fuck-you Poison Swamp truly are horrendous, but besides those it's a great experience! It's a shame it doesn't have the sprawling, open exploration of DS1, but what it does have is great level design in the areas that are there, fantastic visual design and several amazing bosses.
Plus one of FromSoft's best ever boss soul weapons. Look up the Farron Greatsword and its moveset!
People didn't call Dave the Diver an indie game. The Game Awards nominated it in that category, and rightly got a lot of shit for it.
Indie is a fraught and vague term in whatever genre of culture it gets applied to. During the early 00s indie music era you had tons of mass produced "indie rock" pushed out by big labels too.
Everyone kind of knows what it's supposed to mean: small budget, small crew, independent of the major commercial publishers/labels/whatever. But there will always be edge cases in both directions.
I agree with your take. The definition of what an "indie" is is very vague and subjective, but given the budget and resources and circumstances of E33's development it seems outside the scope of what seems to be the "spirit of the award".
Blue Prince should have gotten the award to begin with.
Have seen most of these, but that doesn't make it any better. The times we're living in are just swell, aren't they?