Been having exceptionally difficult few weeks, mental health wise. Playing stardew valley to cope.

I have just started Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. My reaction to the opening controls training sequence: Dear lord why am I working in such a dangerous place?! This is the most dangerous environment I can imagine! Why is it so difficult to get anywhere? What am I trying to accomplish by risking my life right now?! WORST SHIPYARD EVER.

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).

Finally got around to starting Sekiro a month ago and 100+ hours and five runs later I’m wondering why I waited so long

Started red dead redemption, I wanted to play something on the TV with a controller, so far it’s pretty good but I’m having a hard time with the controller haha

Hades again. I’m on a rogue lite binge lately.

After getting annoyed at New Vegas, I picked up Red Dead Redemption 2 and have been really enjoying it. I kind want to get a cowboy hat, not ironically. My wife would probably hate it though.

I picked up RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on GOG after learning about OpenRCT2. Pretty much it’s an open source engine that allows the game to run on modern operating systems really easily. I’ve never played any RollerCoaster Tycoon before, but so far I’ve been having a great time with it!

Death Stranding Director’s Cut via PlayStation Plus membership. I had a healthy amount of skepticism about it at launch, but it got its hooks in me deep. I’ve got 80 hours so far and I’m planning to Platinum it before moving on.

It’s one of those games that will either bore you to tears or suck you in. Half of my gaming sessions are just spent building infrastructure. The game progression is on point.

Outer Wilds! (Not to be confused with ‘The Outer Wilds’)

Be careful not to read into it too much; the less you know going into it the better!!

I’m still enjoying guild wars 2. It avoids most of the MMO bullshit, so it’s just fun to play every so often. No gear treadmills or chasing bigger numbers forever. Just you and 49 buds fighting demons together. Or you and 50 friends dropping meteor showers on 100 jerks who are trying to break into your castle. Or just farting around on your lonesome is fine, too.

Playing Hogwarts Legacy for the first time now