Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of December 8th

Still working on finishing the Space Age DLC in Factorio. It's really damn good. I have been taking my time working through the new planets, so still got a bit to go.

Just started Animal Well and Tunic. Both are great games so far.

Both are great games, but I was too much of a brainlet to find some of the later stuff myself.
Played Animal Well at launch, grabbed me and wouldn't let me go, finished everything except some of the meta puzzles, found all the eggs without any hints or guides. Excellent game.

Played Tunic at launch with gamepass, bounced off of it because it was too souls-like, thought it was going to be something else. Just bought it during the steam sale, trying it again (now that I know what I'm getting into) and it's turns out it wasn't as brutal as I first thought (after figuring out how to upgrade my stats). It's got a great map, gameplay is okay, but it's environmental storytelling is kinda meh. Just got to the... underground... spookyish... area (trying not to spoil) and it's kinda... I dunno. Seems like it's trying to be a little too meta (like the stuff in the library). I'll probably finish it, but it isn't nearly as good as Animal Well, in my opinion.

I just finished "The Return of the Obra Dinn". A great indy game if you're into detectives or deductive reasoning.

Obra dinn is great!!! You should check out case of the golden idol and it's sequel if you liked obra dinn!
- Thanks for the tip! Wishlisted!

I was almost done with it last week, but I finished Baldur's Gate - Siege of Dragonspear DLC. It's terrible. The story is trash, especially the second half, and all characters, your party included, lose the ability to put two and two together. I haven't played BG2 and don't know if I ever will, but I can't imagine this DLC is adding anything to the overall story.

Then I played through Final Fantasy VII Remake again. I definitely thought the game was shorter, mainly because I forgot about all the terrible moments. I still like the game, but there are a bunch of bosses and sequences that are cancer, and the game would be better if they were removed completely or at least much shorter. Hopefully it doesn't take too much longer for Rebirth to make it to the PC.

Finally, I re-subbed to World of Warcraft for a month. For the 20th Anniversary, there's a huge 3-month event going on. It's running until early January, and you can get a bunch of old or removed stuff again. I'll just do some quests once or twice a week, so I can buy the stuff that I want.

World of Warcraft

I'm clean, I'm clean!

Been enjoying the Raging Echoes league in Oldschool RuneScape for the past couple weeks. Kind of found new addiction to the game again.

It's kind of fun to blast through content in days or weeks instead of the usual months or years in the main game

I am not in my second zone yet. Care to tell me your league choices?
- I went with Trian -> Fremmy -> Kourend and all on range>melee. For relics harpoon, dodgy deals, clue compass, golden god, slayer master, bankers note, overgrown and last stand.
  
  Have had a blast powering through echo bosses and cox, and had couple attempts in Inferno for the first time. 3 wipes on Zuk now haha.
  
  Otherwise I'm happy with the choices, but honestly not sold on Tirannwan. Sure there's ton of easy tasks and crystal+BofA, but 1 for going very dry on BofA and the fact that it's losing in DPS for both blowpipe and tbow everything I do I kinda wish I took Varlamore instead
  
  What you're planning?

I'm going to get into Path of Exile 2 this week. Seems like most players are happy with it.

Loving it.

On the Steam Deck, it was playable, but I couldn't find settings that looked good and were visually clear, so I finally got around to setting up Sunshine and Moonlight (in-house streaming) and it's amaze balls.

I'm using a script that switches my desktop to a virtual monitor that's the Steam Deck's native resolution, and I recently upgraded my house to a WiFi 6 mesh network, so it's working almost flawlessly. (I often get crashes on startup, but it's never taken more than 3 tries, then no issues.)

I'm still only in act 1 (limited playtime) but I'm so excited to be playing PoE again, and PoE2 is perfect for playing with a controller.
Yup. Pretty good and also pretty hard.
- Yep getting smashed a lot now. Will have to switch some skills around and try to improve.

I played Ori and the Blind Forest which I enjoyed, although I was expecting a metroidvania. The platforming was quite fun and challenging enough and the art looked great.

I played a bit of Moonring, which seems really good, but I'm probably not used to the genre and found it a bit too confusing to continue.

I briefly played Marvel Rivals with a friend, I had fun with it in these first few hours, but I haven't played hero shooters before so it's early for me to judge. I'm a bit surprised there's no restrictions on roles in a party, as most matches seem to have 1 tank and 4 dps and as a healer I can't figure out how to keep everyone alive alone. Hopefully ranked is more balanced.

Also started playing DnD (5e) with friends. First time, seems fun. I'm playing artificer, planning on specializing to alchemist at lvl 3.

Ori and the Blind Forest which I enjoyed, although I was expecting a metroidvania

What genre do you think the game belongs to? Just a normal platformer?

I would say, while combat is not the focus in the game, it still has all the trappings of a metroidvania.
- More puzzle platformer with progression in the form of abilities you unlock.
  
  For why I don't think it's a metroidvania, it's because there's no backtracking when you get a new ability (except for small optional stuff), you start from the center and go to each area in order and the areas themselves are mostly linear.

Finished Dredge, and now onto Somerville

My partner and I have been playing some of the board games from the recent humble bundle and having a lot of fun! Cats and Quilts of Calico is a nice little strategy game where you place colored tiles and get points for their adjacency, plus it has a cat creator. Terraforming Mars is like the board game but waaaaaay easier because you don’t have to track your little cubes and all your actions manually.

Hoping to try out the new Pavlov update tonight, even if it is a little disappointing (ported maps and paid skins 🥲)

Calico is great! Not sure if there is a digital version, but you would probably like Cascadia if you like Calico.
- Circling back and confirming it’s a lot of fun! The digital version is a little buggy but we played it a few hours last night and will probably play a few more rounds tonight
- Only $15 on steam! Thanks for the rec, I’ll have to check it out

Terraria. I'm trying to make a flat small world pre-Hardmode, starting at the depth level from the western ocean (240' above surface level) and going all the way east. I'm trying to keep the biomes, re-placing or filling blocks as needed (e.g. mud for jungle, snow for arctic, sand for desert and stone for crimson), while also making some hellevators, especially a wide (5+ blocks of distance) one between the crimson and its two neighboring biomes (so crimson won't spread, specially if and when I enter hardmode).

Specifically at the desert biome, which was way below 240', I needed more sand than the world had to offer, so I needed to smuggle sand from another world I temporarily created. I dug thousands and thousands of sand blocks and sandstone blocks, taking them with my character to this world that I'm terraforming.

As I started to smuggle blocks from a world to another, my objective became two: terraforming two worlds, the first world being leveled from sea to sea while keeping every biome, and the other being almost emptied (I'm calling it "voidforming" because I'm intending to take out literally every block I can, from space to underworld; as for the underworld's lava, I'm using the infinite bucket trickery to create honey so I can convert the lava into crispy honey blocks which can be converted to hive when casting them to the shimmer, and part of this hive can be possibly converted to honey again while digging it; Lihzard blocks, Crimson altars and Dungeon blocks seem to be the only blocks I won't be capable of removing in a pre-Hardmode world that actually won't see any hardmode at all, as every single pool of lava will be removed so the Guide Voodoo Doll won't have lava to be thrown to). Blocks from the voidformed world are mean to be used to help terraforming the other world, while the achievements from the terraformed world (such as tissue samples from Brain of Cthulhu) can be used to build tools and resources that will help on voidforming the other world.

Lots of work, but it's just so I can have something to keep my mind busy.

Started Mech Armada, a roguelite which is turn based and with a fairly good customisation system which gives full freedom in making units from what you 'find' (pay to unlock randomly by paying a resource which is also used for other things so you have to choose) in the run.

Required a fair bit of learning through experimentation but now I, at least keep winning the first map and have just reached the boss of the second. Without any of the 'roguelite' bonuses. Which you can unlock with a separate currency earned. I chose not to unlock anything to see how viable it is without unlocks. It is decent. That said, there are more pieces added to the 'gacha' as you play. Through an experience system. The experience system carries over between runs but is not really a 'boost' since it just unlocks a bigger pool of more varied parts.