I’ve really been enjoying EVE Online for the past few months. Tried it a decade ago and bounced right off, but it caught me this time around.

In memory of Matthew Perry, I played through Fallout New Vegas, with the Viva New Vegas mod pack. I sided with Benny (the character voiced by Perry) for the first time ever. Even played a female character with the black widow perk, so Benny could get lucky one last time.

Elden Ring. I tried it again after bouncing off in 2022. So glad I did. Absolutely massive, dense world to explore and beautiful art direction

Picked up Marvel’s midnight suns when it was on sale in november and oh boy does it scratch my itch. 60 hours in and on the final mission. Definitely going to go back for a second playthrough/new game plus!

Star Wars: The Old Republic

The lethal company, casual fun if you can find 2-3 friends to play.

I’ve just been playing Valorant, might get back into Age of Empires 2.

Remnant From the Ashes: They call it a Souls-like with guns, I’m not sure I totally agree, but there are similarities with the checkpoints and NG+ mechanic. It’s a shortish game. Plays well in coop, and is made tomplay through a few times as levels are procedurally generated. The second game is out now, but there are still players on this.

Astral Ascent: Kind of a rogue-like action platformer, the game seems straightforward at the beginning but as you try new runs and unlock more skills there is a very deep build and progression system where you can get super powerful and the screen goes wacky. Also the music and atmosphere is top notch. Oh it’s only just been released, but it has been in early access for +6 months, so sorry, not sorry.

• Little Nightmares
• Hollow Knight
• CrossCode
• Katamari Damacy Reroll
• Dad Quest
• Bendy and the Ink Machine

I got most of those in the recent Steam sale, and I’m pretty sure they go on sale regularly, so if you’re interested, maybe wait until the next sale.

I also just finished Mirrorama last night, which was pretty fun but the story bits were weird and not my cup of tea.

I also have a bunch of games on the backburner, just waiting for a few days off work to really dive in again.

Had a devil of a time finding a good cartoony cart racer for PC. Giving Team Sonic Racing a try this weekend. The great thing about having a young kid who’s just getting into gaming, it really leans me into patience. We get to revisit a TON of old games, and they’re CHEAP.

I am playing Cyberpunk 2077. Pretty much finished the main story and playing the DLC story line right now.

It’s great fun but when I hit the level cap I got bored regarding my playstyle (SMG and sword) and started experimenting with different weapons and skills. Since you can’t max out every skill I cheated to achieve this.

Now I’m a omnipotent killing machine and should probably increase the difficulty…

32 hours into my first playthrough of Metro Exodus. I think I’m on the last chapter now (dead city). The game is simply a great piece of art. It adds open world like mechanics but in such an immersive way that even if you are “clearing” a marker, it takes a lot of deliberate thought and planning that it genuinely feels like a linear level inside a cohesive open world. There have been attempts like this, in games like Gears 5, TLoUP2, Uncharted 4, where you suddenly are in this huge space and going back and forth to clear out stuff in a shallow way. This feels much more deep (TLoUP2 was better one of the three, but Exodus is much more detailed) and for me it really worked well.

The game is bit clunky, but I feel it only works in its favour. If you think of a cool FPS like Far Cry, everything is smooth, quick and snappy. Guns feel great, killing is fun, traversal is pretty much brainless. Metro Exodus is completely opposite as your guns keep getting dirty, out of ammo or discharged. Killing isn’t fun as you’ve to be careful with ammo and also the moral points. Traversal is slow or so finicky that you have to pay attention. All that clunk makes you actually feel everything the game wants you to feel.

The criticisms that I do have though are largely to do with dumb AI and the good ending/bad ending system that is a series standard. I know I should not kill, so I try to be sneaky. But when I fail, then I can predict enemy movements, come in and out of dark places and just knock them out. This breaks everything and what should be either fun shoot out or a stressful stealth mission, becomes a cat and mouse game of knocking everyone out. You also don’t want to skip any of the locations as the game otherwise teaches you that important loot or lore can be hidden, which is generally true. So if you want the good ending, and want to upgrade gear, you pretty much have to do the dance of knocking everyone out. This is why I’m 30 hours in to the game. If the game wants us to find all the lore, and wants us to improve our gear and use newer weapons, I think it shouldn’t let us have agency over story, or it should have non lethal weapons to make it more fun to take out bases without killing anyone.

Overall I’m very happy with the game. I’ll probably replay it and not care about good ending and just play it as a shooter even if the game doesn’t want you to do that (OMG the terrible music it plays when you do something wrong lol).

I started playing The Ascent, I do dig the cyberpunk atmosphere.

I played bitburner for a bit (heh). It helped me so much to practice js coding, I was so rusty. It is free BTW.

Factorio, never had a sale, free demo on website.

GTA SA on iPad, the nostalgia kicked in hard this weekend