Ghost of Yotei was excellent, but slightly disappointing, in exactly the way you’d expect of a sequel to an excellent game that committed to an unusual vibe. That is, it’s mostly the same vibe, only now it doesn’t feel unusual. Still great, likely better than GoT, but less refreshing.
Much like how I feel about Breath of the Wild and its sequel, honestly.
I’m sure everyone’s been waiting anxiously for my StS2 thoughts … I hit the 100 hour mark while on vacation a couple of weeks ago and kind of forgot my earlier post. Did want to check in, though.
I don’t think the game’s revolutionary, but it is a more polished take on the original formula with enough new content to make me happy. The enemies, bosses, and events are all new (some of them may effectively be reworked from StS). The heroes are a nice mix of old and new, with each one offering multiple deck archetypes.
The Ironclad, Silent, and Defect return with several new cards and changes to some returning cards. I find Silent much more fun to play now, having made some great shiv builds and some great draw/discard builds. Defect still really clicks for me. It’s added one new orb type, glass, which hits all enemies but gradually decreases in effectiveness. And I still suck at Ironclad runs and probably always will.
I like the two new heroes a lot. The Regent adds a second resource type, stars, with some cards generating stars and other cards requiring stars to play. He also has a “forge” mechanic that initially creates and later strengthens a powerful attack card, Sovereign Blade, that can be buffed by other Regent cards as well.
The skeletal Necrobinder has a constant companion–Osty, her reanimated left hand (yes, you’re reading that correctly)–who can attack independently and will block damage if you don’t have enough block. She also has a debuff, doom, that will kill an enemy once the doom level exceeds the enemy’s HP.
The early access process seems mostly focused on balancing and finishing art now. Mega Crit has promised more endgame content later–StS2 currently has the familiar 3-floor structure the original started with, with the real final boss still TBD.
Again, I’m not sure any of this stuff is groundbreaking. There’s a lot here that’s new to StS but probably not new to the genre–all the deckbuilders I’ve played sort of blend together at this point. I’m still thrilled to get a sequel and will happily put another 100+ hours into it.
I’ve always been a physical-copies-only guy (and no, this isn’t about the disc-less future Sony is promising us) so I am struggling with making the shift to digital games as my son is getting older. You see, if I buy digital, we can play together with one purchase. We’ve got our eyes on the Star Wars racing game coming in a couple of months and it is now dawning on me that I’m going to have to start plopping down $70 for a digital license on many of my future games rather than filling my shelf with fun boxes. Sigh. Perhaps it was inevitable and perhaps it’s just preparing me for the all-digital future but I’m old and grumpy and I don’t like it.
Since I broke my weak minded new years resolution yet again and abandoned my strict „one game per Plattform policy“ again, I am currently cycling through half a dozen games on my PlayStation 5. In my unhealthy obsession of using old game replays to wedge in some podcast time to multitask (yeah I am an idiot what else is new) I was playing the Ezio Triology over the past year or so on and off. After the discussion here about recommending @Mirefox an Assassin Creed Game I decided to finish up AC Brotherhood over the past days which I was about half way trough before that. Rolled credits earlier. Since playing AC Origins and repeatedly fumbling about in AC Odyssey in the pandemic times I haven’t had much AC playtime until last week.
Did I misplace my rose-tinted glasses or what? I distinctly remember that the first AC was very clunky and AC2 was sooooooOoooo much better. I still like the Ezio Setting more than the intermediate/modern AC games (recent modern games not included) but HOLY HELL was the parcour the last couple of days clunky as hell. How many times I missed a jump because I hadn’t aligned my analog stick to the correct nanodegree rotatation to jump forward but slightly to the left.
I wasn’t a good „gamer“ in my youth and I am sure not getting better now. I utterly lack the „challenge me“ Genom and have an abundance of „entertain me, but don’t rock my boat to much!“ Genom instead. I had some truly white knuckle moments here and there. With age I get more and more impatient and cranky when I am blessed with forced BS in games. A sign that some people may never grow up enough to not be called immature anymore eh? I am blessed(?) that I never grew into the ridiculous habit to throw my controller somewhere, but I am slamming my hand on my knees in frustration instead….thank god no bruises yet 
So, did I misremember things? Was the Ezio era just as clunky as AC1? Or…are all AC games (modern ones included) clunky and not friendly to ultraprecise controller usage turned of lazy-gamers like me. I may have to rethink my stance on suggesting AC2 Ezio Trilogy as a good AC starting point.
Or is this all moot because @Mirefox took a sharp left turn and started with the AC Chronicles trilogy instead - the 2D „sidescrolling“ spin-of games (AC India, Russia and China) 
That pretty much nails it. I am drawn to the games very much in concept, but playing them is an exercise in frustration for me. If devs were smart, they’d create an older-person mode for people like me.
A reason I never will click with Souls Games…to much perfection asked from the player. The Jury is still out on Returnal and Sauros.
Funny that mind of ours. The one true exception to my usual „don’t ask too much of me game!“ are the Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West games. I don’t mind being repeatedly mauled by a overgrown Dishwasher/Loaderbot Hybrid Dinosaur because I messed something up. And believe me I do mess up, a lot.
I guess immersion truly trounces gameplay (and the stellar soundtrack (especially on the second game)) helps. I repeatedly actively search out some of the biggest and most difficult enemy types in that game just to get the specific track that plays for that fight. Boss Music? Which one? Every enemy has its own badass track!
I was pretty late to the party but I recently picked up Vampire Survivors in my phone and was hooked pretty quickly. The gameplay loop with the progression was addicting and I felt that I accomplished something nearly every run.
High on this survivor genre that I only just started playing I have been putting a little time into Dragon Quest Smash/Grow and the difference between the to couldn’t me more pronounced. Vampire Survivors is a game clearly crafted with thought and love. DQ is a soulless husk filled with multiple currencies, timers, a boatload of menus and events, more systems than I can count, and a million things to upgrade just for the sake of more numbers. The surface gameplay is similar but that is where the comparisons end. It is so sad to see crap like this that could actually be decent if it weren’t just some Corporate-mandated money vacuum.
Deep Rock Survivor is a similar type of game that I’ve been playing. The systems are pretty straightforward. You might like it. I think the game includes a few free levels and you can unlock the game with a single purchase and there is an additional expansion you can buy. No timers, multiple currencies are other manipulative microtransactions.Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor App - App Store
Marvel Tokon. It definitely makes me feel my age because I simply don’t have the reflexes to be good at these kinds of games anymore. It is visually stunning and has enough modes to keep me entertained, but I’m also overwhelmed with the systems. I also feel like I’m getting a little overwhelmed with the rushdown characters. I need to find someone a bit slower and more defensive.
That said, the game seems excellent (well, at least on PS5 - I’ve read that the PC version is borked) and any issues that I have are really about me, not the game.
I’ve, uh, been playing Fortnite. See, I recently got a Riffmaster guitar for the Xbox which works much better than my janky old Rock Band guitar. Interfacing with Harmonix’s servers also seems a bit troubled, but the Rock Band team got hired by Epic to make Rock Band a mode for Fortnite (one imagines there are excellent business reasons revolving around V-bucks). It’s been really nice! The note timing is a bit more flexible than just hit or miss—there’s a longer period in which you count as hitting the note, but you also get feedback on whether you were a little early, a little late, or right on. As a result, it feels easier to try things a little outside your comfort zone, but still possible to see high levels of skill recognized.
There’s a rotating set of about 40 songs you can play for free, and those and some others, but not the whole catalog, can be “purchased” with V-bucks at a kind of exorbitant rate. But, in the past month, there’s always been some older stuff, some familiar stuff, and a lot or new stuff that I liked well enough to play a few times before it rotates out and which I’d likely never have thought about otherwise. So I’ve yet to feel like buying anything (honestly, the closest I’ve come to considering it was Mambo No. 5, which I’ve long regarded as a middling song, but is very fun to play at my current skill level). Playing a four-song set or two each day in Fortnite has been really quite satisfying.
I don’t really have a major game to which I’m devoting much time at the moment, largely because I feel like I have a ton of soloable boardgames I’ve been excited about, and a bunch of assembling and painting of miniatures in the hopes of getting in on a Spearhead league at work (I now work part-time at my FLGS).
I am currently back playing “two point campus” - which happened to be sitting in my steam list.
It’s pretty good, as expected it isn’t too hard - the game does take a while to reveal itself as you slowly unlock stuff.
But it is also about as hard as I can handle after work - I am getting too old to play stuff that is hard!
Assuming a list is forthcoming? Don’t be a tease.
We still have our old 360 setup in the living room for Rock Band 3, which I own a LOT of songs for and we still play that some. I don’t think we could get fortnite on the 360 though, and the only modern console we have is the Switch, and that is the original Switch, not the 2 - but I don’t think our instruments would work with that.
Perhaps this is what you are looking for Stage Tour
I had a regular Rock Band group 15 or so years ago. We had hundreds of DLC songs, an advanced drum kit, and even the keyboard. We had hundreds of hours of fun and were actually quite good since both my wife and I used to play the drums and one of my friends is a vocalist. We weee ranked in the top 10 worldwide on a couple songs.
Once the PS5 came out I developed some serious hardware lag and could never get the instruments to sync properly. Long story short, we sold all our hardware at a garage sale and it is honestly a top-tier regret. I would be having an absolute blast with my kids if I still had all my Rock Band stuff.
I’ve heard that there might be another Guitar Hero in the pipeline and I would gladly re-buy as much plastic junk as would be required to get back in to the rhythm games.
Thanks @Strangiato ! Unless I read somewhere that the game is seriously broken, that could be an instabuy for me.
It keeps growing! I just returned from vacation in the Vancouver area, where I bought Reforest (and the somewhat better-reviewed standalone expansion), in which you play plants to locations on your mountain to recover after a wildfire. Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks to fill a role similar to Wingspan, and I dig the mechanic that you can reuse a slot by playing a taller plant to it, but, if the previous plant doesn’t thrive in shade, you shade it out and return its nutrients to the soil.
I had hoped to get Catacombs, because we drove up to Toronto and flew from there, and Elzra Games ships from the same town as the airport and I didn’t want to deal with international shipping and tariff nonsense for a game I was just kind of curious about. But they don’t have a public-facing store, and, tragically, the Toronto-area stores I found didn’t have it in stock. So, when I went to work and found someone had sold us a used copy of Catacombs & Castles, I picked that up to play against myself. Tried it once so far, and it’s thrilling! I just like the emotional drama that the dexterity element adds. There’s a bunch of special powers, so every game is going to feel like exploring a new puzzle about how all this stuff interacts.
Dice Conquest is 20 Strong for when you’re exhausted. Everything about it, from the name, to the cover art, to the rules, says “this game is not about wowing you with creativity, it’s just about being a cheap, portable good time”. And it absolutely succeeds at that. Low barrier to entry is sometimes just what I need.
I’m currently reading The Byzantine Wars in preparation for two-handing Seljuk, from GMT’s Levy & Campaign series. I’ve always wanted to play a logistics-forward wargame, and this seems like a neat period about which I am largely uninformed.
I got into Unstoppable because I was interested in the upcoming Dungeon Crawler Carl version, and I’ve long wanted to try another of John D. Clare’s card-builders, after finding Mystic Vale interesting, but not compelling. Turns out, the momentum-based thing it has going on leads to a really unfamiliar flow to the play, which I find absolutely fascinating. I still don’t think it’ll ever be my favorite, but I’m having lots of fun exploring it.
I recently bought the bundle the Coincidence was selling of all their games, including Chemistry Set (which I’ve yet to try, and maybe never will), Lucky Seven, and Zach Attack. Lucky Seven is possibly the best solo game I’ve played for its weight, and Zach Attack is a bundle of scratch-off tickets with actual games on them. It’s not amazing, but for something you can play with just a card and a metal guitar pick (included), it’s very enjoyable. I brought Dragons of Etchinstone with me thinking it’d be ideal for a tray table, and found myself playing Zach Attack instead because it was so convenient and eased my fears about dropping cards.
I have yet to even try Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs, and, probably, a bunch of others I’m not thinking about.
I forgot Fliptown, Moytura, Fate of the Fellowship, Endeavor: Deep Sea, The Anarchy, Guild of Merchant Explorers, Ascending Empires, Imperium: Classics, On to Moscow, Waypoints, Dune: War for Arrakis, Vijayanagara, Votes for Women, Typeset, Witchcraft, Crokinole Cards, and Cloudspire.
And I still want to get back to homebrewing a Space Hulk alternative.
@rinelk I’ve been interested in Fate of the Fellowship and Guild of Merchant Explorers for a while … any thoughts you’d be willing to share on either?
Guild of Merchant Explorers struck me as quite pleasant! My only complaint was some unusually small tokens which were a touch annoying to manipulate. But the core puzzle is very solid, and it plays reasonably quickly without feeling negligible. My only hesitation in recommending it is that I think there are a number of games which fill a similar niche.
Fate of the Fellowship is wild, and excellent. Fall of Rome was already my favorite Pandemic, and this adds a bunch of very thematic stuff. It’s not quite as elegant as a result, but it’s absolutely worth it, and is probably the best second cooperative game for a group I’ve played. Strategy feels very open and (at my early level of skill) hard to parse, resulting in some thematically bizarre but entertaining game states—in our last game, we recruited every horseman in Rohan and absolutely rampaged through Minas Morgul, only to get bogged down in the ash and smoke of Mordor and leave Sauron’s forces a free hand in the rest of Middle-Earth. Which, I mean—that’s exactly the sort of really divergent alternate story I want to be able to come out of a game like this, so I’m all for it.
I do think the Nazgûl should’ve been chunky tokens, though. They fall over annoyingly, and I will likely replace them with ones that use the names from Iron Crown’s old RPG and the Middle Earth: The Wizards TCG (these were never official, but Tolkien didn’t give all the Nazgûl names, so they extended his work a bit).