been playing Hyper Demon again for the first time in a year and a half. i got sucked in around the launch in 2022 and put a ton of time in, but i gradually drifted away in favor of other games. it's nice to go back and see that i still have the impulse, that i can score better than all my friends even 500+ days later lol
it's fun to play this around people because the question is invariably "how can you tell what's going on?" it's very pretty and very fast-paced so most people just see it as a kaleidoscope. but, like devil daggers before it, hyper demon is very understandable and bound to a specific set of subtle rules that are rewarding and empowering to learn/master. the colors and shifting visual effects and everything also all serve real gameplay purposes - telling you enemy states, informing you where weak points and resources are, telling you when an enemy is behind you. once you map those purposes to your mental model of the game, it becomes a lot easier.
Hyper Demon is so cool... I really gotta check it out soon!!
I've been playing some Cantata recently. I think it's best described as a "turn based RTS" or a "tactics RTS" but it's definitely in that zone between RTS game and tactics game and it borrows from both genres in interesting ways.
I think one the most compelling parts of it for me so far is the art, which is frequently overwhelming and fairly difficult to read, but always gorgeous and strange. The character design is wild. Everyone is colorful and the line art is incredible.
The story is also pretty interesting. I've completed three fairly long campaign missions and encountered three factions so far. The first faction is a kind of imperialistic human soldier-boy faction led by a decadent king who seems kind of like a dipshit (but then turns into a turbo powerful unit, haha). Then there's a nature faction made up of a combination of beings that seem like aliens... and beings that seem like modified humans? weird monsters? hard to tell. There are these centaurs that are part tree or something? I like those guys a lot. The final faction is a sentient rogue robot faction led by a bunch of robot minds in the same body... I like that this faction converses in perhaps the most "normal guy" voice of the lot. The humans are so imperialistic in this world that it ends up feeling like the robots express more human care for one another and levelheaded calm than anyone else, haha.
The factions play pretty differently and have enough variation that I've had to relearn my play style for each one. I think one weakness is that the tutorial I was given was only for the human faction, which is the most typical-RTS-y of them all--collecting gems with structure, making other structures out of them, etc. Some of the other factions have key economic units (at least I think they're economic units? they hold resources in their inventories?) that I haven't been able to completely figure out yet, haha.
Anyway, highly recommend it. Very weird. Playing it is sometimes a little tough and I have encountered several frustrating bugs, but it's really delightful to see something this fresh and strange.
I've been playing some Lightyear Frontier recently with my wife.
It came out on Early Access a little over a week ago, and it's a pretty nice chill game.
TL;DR You build a farm on an alien planet and explore and you clean up and restore areas to help nature. It also has mechs. And 4 player co-op!
I don't have any screenshots easily available on me, but hopefully the steam store page should be enough!
I played some Splinter Cell Blacklist yesterday, which always makes me want to make something. I think it is a pretty masterful video game. Every way to play it is extremely cool, which is impressive for a stealth game that's trying to recognise every playstyle in that context from "don't let anyone see you" to "nonlethal only" to "kill everyone quietly" to "kill everyone loudly but by surprise". Typically I am a nonlethal player but yesterday I was playing "lethal and as fast as possible and rolling with the punches" which is a whole different kind of fun. Here is a video of me doing that.
i'm like 90 hours into ff7 rebirth, where i wildly fluctuate between loving it and hating it. it sure is a thing!
i think the most interesting thing about it to me is that it's more an interpretation of a source material than a remake, kind of like baz luhrman's romeo + juliet, and i've long advocated for square enix just treating the final fantasy canon as a collection of works that people can adapt for radical (or orthodox) retellings of "the classics"
Played some Destiny 2 with one of my partners this morning, and a bit of Stardew in between bouts of gamedev after they went to bed. You know, just cozy stuff.
Played the first full mission of Pacific Drive last night. It scratches several itches for me, most notably the one where you hoover up loads of crafting bits and bobs and use them to make incremental upgrades to something. The other need it fulfills for me is one I didn't know I had, which is the need to hear a guy doing a kind of "Car Talk guy" impression yammer at me for hours. Major childhood flashbacks
I wasn't really aware that this was a kind of twist on a looting and crafting survival game, but I like those so I'm enjoying it. I do appreciate how the environment is full of weird objects and sounds that move or trigger in response to your actions, but through a kind of unknowable linkage--you end up wondering whether you are really controlling these chunks of moving rock and outbursts of eerie audio, or whether you're just imagining it. It's not always atmospheric so much as tense, and the game does seem to be aiming in a very honest way for a kind of "gamey" version of that alien-haunted Zone shit... not much of what I've seen so far has been particularly spooky, which I'm totally fine with. Going to play more for sure!
