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Onhell said:
Are you fully invested in the Remedyverse or just Alan Wake?
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Just Alan Wake. I didn't get far with Control. Somehow that game felt a bit tedious. In general I like horror/adventure games. Some of my all time favorites:
1. Dead Space Trilogy
2. Medium
3. Resident Evil Village
4. Alan Wake
5. Evil Within 2

Looking forward to:
1. Silent Hill
2. Alone in the dark
 
Jadukor said:
Just Alan Wake. I didn't get far with Control. Somehow that game felt a bit tedious. In general I like horror/adventure games. Some of my all time favorites:
1. Dead Space Trilogy
2. Medium
3. Resident Evil Village
4. Alan Wake
5. Evil Within 2

Looking forward to:
1. Silent Hill
2. Alone in the dark
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DUUUUDE, you're missing out on a lot of fun easter eggs and connected lore. However, I get it when a game doesn't "click" for you no matter how much someone hypes it up. Thankfully, Youtube exists, I highly recommend watching this to get the gist of it. It's fairly long, so feel free to watch it in chunks, but it's worth the whole watch:
 
Spent the last two evenings discovering Chalice Dungeons in Bloodborne, also got more proficient in the game and levelled up a bit, so I returned to Darkbeast Paarl and worsted him in a single try. Got to the bottom of Healing Church Workshop, on the fucking beams, turned day into night and went to Forbidden Woods, Lecture Hall and just a tiny bit of Nightmare Frontier.

I'm really, really liking the game, in a way I'm more pissed off it's PS4 exclusive now that I can play it, because I can't really spread the joy :D (no-one in my community has PS, even I got it only now, when a friend of mine gave me a used PS4 he bought somewhere for Christmas).

P. S. - getting your Insight up and seeing Amygdalae for the first time is really cool.
 
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Finally got the platinum trophy for Dark Souls II (SOTFS version). Perfect timing, so that I can fully focus on FFVII Rebirth at the end of the month.

I loved the game. It is its own brand of weird and tried a ton of different things. Yeah, some things don't work out and the over reliance on gank fights is frustrating. The co-op parts of the DLCs are shitty as well. But on average most things worked out really well and I liked my time with the game.

My biggest issue with Dark Souls was that it often felt like a lesser retreading of interesting concepts from Demon's Souls. DS2 goes in quite a different direction and I'm all for it. I loved that durability gets restored at bonfires. That you can freely travel from every bonfire. That you can despawn enemies if you're having trouble with an area. That NG+ isn't automatically triggered by finishing the game, that you have to actively choose the option. That you can freely change covenants without penalty. That you can use bonfire ascetics to reset an area but make it more difficult (shout-outs to the Rotten and the Giant Lord who I killed a dozen or so times each to get my soul memory high enough to bypass the first half on NG+ and NG++). That you can use lifegems in a way similar to the grass in Demon's for additional healing capabilities.

I really enjoyed the visual identity of the game. DeS, DS1 and DS2 are all very ugly games. Not in a "these graphics look bad" kind of way. In a "this is an intentionally rough art style" kind of way. Yet despite that DS2 is filled with beautiful locations. DS1 had Anor Londo and Ash Lake aaand that's basically it. DS2 has Majula (more comfy than beatiful I guess), Heide's Tower Of Flame, freaking Drangleic Castle which feels like goind up Dracula's Castle in (insert favorite Castlevania game). And that's before we even talk about the DLC areas. Artorias was a great DLC for the great boss battles and the lore, but the locations weren't particularly intersting aesthetically. DS2's DLC areas looked amazing and it was a joy to explore them.

The enemy placement in the game felt unnecessarily punishing at times though. Crown Of The Sunken King looked amazing and the (admittedly rather simple) button and obelisk puzzles were neat. The enemies were super frustrating though. As if that weren't enough, the bosses had their own share of problems too. Elana was a cool concept with summoning Velstadt or the Skeletons, but Sinh? Who the hell thought a boss that spends 90% of the time in the air, has poison-fire attacks and freaking corrosive skin that melts your weapons is a good idea? Thankfully I killed him on my second try, but it was not a fun time. The Cave Of The Dead was thankfully painless and I one shot it.
Crown Of The Old Iron King on the other hand was beautiful, much more fair and had great bosses. Iron Passage is utter bullshit though and I died a bunch of times there.
Crown Of The Ivory King was super fun to explore as well and Frigid Outskirts was not as bad as I had heard. On a similar note Shrine Of Amana was relatively painless as well.

All in all I died 239 times across 2 and a half playthroughs. 207 of those were on my first run through the game. A good chunk of those, probably around a quarter, was me being a moron and falling down random pits including such feats of glory as running down a narrow flight of stairs with bottomless pits on either side and randomly jumping in the direction I'm running for no reason other than thinking it'd be fun, only for the bottom of the stairs swerving to the right and then to the left again (meaning there was a hole if you didn't change directions and continued straight ahead) which made me fall down the hole. And I did that twice.
Another chunk of that were me getting impatient while farming the Rotten and Giant Lord and dying to rather stupid mistakes. Most of my deaths were against regular enemies though. I stand by my previous assessment that Demon's Souls, Dark 1 and Dark 2 are not nearly as difficult as the memes suggest and that I've had far more difficulty with other games. Though I'm sure this will change once I continue with DS3, Bloodborne and Elden Ring proper.

The lore and the story are super interesting and I enjoyed it far more compared to DS1. A shame that most of it won't be touched again and that apparently some tidbits got retconned by DS3. The soundtrack was a highlight. The OST for Demon's was amazing. Dark Souls 1 on the other hand filled with generic and forgettable "epic orchestra" pieces. DS2 retains the orchestration of its predecessor but has far more memorable compositions.

From the first three games my ranking as of now is: Demon's Souls > Dark Souls 2 > Dark Souls 1.
I'm still having a ton of fun with the games and liking them a lot for various reasons but it's such bullshit that you have to play them through multiple times for the platinum trophy and I hate how some content is easily missable or even mutually exclusive. One of my pet peeves. At least you can rush through these games very fast once you know what you're doing and what you can skip.

So, those are my thoughts on that game. Forgive the rather disjointed rambling lol
 
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Started playing Death Stranding Director’s Cut on PS5. Weird game, but it’s Kojima, so that’s expected. Interesting that balancing cargo is a core game mechanic. Too early to make any judgments.

Still plugging away at my Phoenix Point campaign, though it feels like I must be getting pretty close to the end, since the other factions have all declared war on each other now. Allied with New Jericho but still pursuing the Phoenix Point path simultaneously, so I could go either direction depending on how the stories develop.

Hoping for some big PSVR2 game discounts for the first anniversary of the platform, which is coming up in a couple of weeks. We’ll see.
 
I found out today about a new web browser game called Infinite Craft, where you combine two elements to create new ones. This isn't a new concept but the innovation here is that it uses AI to generate results. I got Rob Halford and about 10 types of Bin Laden.
 
So, I've finally found someone who feels about the nonsensical level design of Dark Souls 2 in a similar way to mine
(and it's not someone whom I usually generally like)

(see cca the next 3 minutes after the timestamp)

I like both games and I prefer DS 1, but I admit that the weirdness of DS2 discoveries made it feel more... dreamlike.
 
Trying to finish off my Phoenix Point campaign, but I had to attack the highest-tier enemy base, which presented a pretty absurd difficulty spike that completely wiped my A squad, because there’s a spider-scorpion thing in there with a ridiculous amount of HP that can spit mind-controlling facehuggers out of its ass, rush one of my soldiers each turn and one-shot them if they don’t have 100% health, and constantly spews will-point-reducing mist while high-level lackey enemies continually spawn. So, yeah, a complete shitshow. And all the human factions have declared war on each other, so the human population is down to 50%, and before too long I’ll be in danger of losing the game based on population. Lovely.

Also picked up Cocoon and Star Trek: Resurgence on discount, so my backlog is even deeper now…
 
Kinda given up any hope of getting my brother into FPS, so I started a solo campaign of Borderlands 2. It's just night and day how much better 2 is onboarding the player than the first game. The first game takes a bit of grinding at the beginning, but once you're past that it eases up. The second one is pure fun from the word "GO!" The humor is much better too. Currently doing the Pirate DLC and it's basically Tatooine LOL. Down to the sand skiff. It's been a much nicer way to deal with stress than some of the other games I got going on right now. Still working my way through Cuphead, finished the first Island, am I am making a bit of progress with the new batch of baddies, though very slowly.
 
Just wanted to share, I know that I sound like a cunt when I put it this way, but going through the Bloodborne DLC and the bosses are indeed harder and more fun, although I've done them only after a few tries (Ludwig took 3 or 4 attempts, Laurence 7 and Lady Maria took 4 tries, got her almost to a sliver of health on my first try already - just parry that bitch, mates!). However, all were incredibly fun, I'm positively addicted to the game.

The most annoying fight of the game must be Living Failures. It's not particularly hard, just weirdly annoying - the only boss fight I'd delete, if I could .
 
Finished my first playthrough of Star Trek: Resurgence, which is a Telltale-style game from a bunch of ex-Telltale folks who formed a studio called Dramatic Labs. It’s set during the time period between Nemesis and the reboot Star Trek film, and it definitely feels like Star Trek, which is nice.

The game engine feels more 3D than past Telltale games, and it’s all handled with more cinematic flair than you might expect, though there’s still some jank on display (weird framerate stutters on a few occasions, video glitches when the camera switches to a completely different viewpoint sometimes, subtitles that don’t fully match the voiced lines, etc.). There are also some stealth and action sequences to the game, which are a welcome change of pace from the choose-your-own-adventure / Heavy Rain stylings of the core gameplay.

They don’t use any licensed music, so don’t expect any of the classic Star Trek musical themes here, though they try to vaguely hint at them sometimes in the passable synth-orchestral score. They also changed the purple parts of the Starfleet uniforms to a grey color, which frankly looks better, but isn’t accurate.

The game itself ping-pongs between two protagonists, the new first officer of the science vessel Resolute and a petty officer engineer from the Resolute’s lower decks. This allows the game to handle both the big-picture bridge action and the hands-on engineering and away team action pretty seamlessly, which is nice. The game offers a couple of familiar faces (Ambassador Spock with a solid soundalike voice actor, and Captain William T. Riker of the U.S.S. Titan, voiced by Jonathan Frakes), and the story is ultimately rooted in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that you’ve likely forgotten about.

I’ll have to do another playthrough to see how much different choices can affect the outcome, but my first playthrough was a solid 10-12 hours that was consistently enjoyable. I picked up the game for $25 on discount and it’s well worth that price even for just a single run.

Guess it’s back to my Phoenix Point campaign for now…
 
I need to pick up Resurgence at some point. I started Robocop: Rogue City today and it's an absolute blast. Playing Robocop just rocks, and the game gets the proper satirical tone of the original film. Peter Weller's back to voice the hero and he does a very good job.
 
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Since I've finished Bloodborne, I've been returning to Elden Ring (well, when I wasn't sick as fuck, that is), especially now in the expectation of the upcoming ABSOLUTELY FUCKING CAPITAL DLC that's just had its trailer released - I'm so hyped - but then it occured to me.

I have PS4 now. I don't have to wait any longer for PC ports of God of War: Ragnarok and Ghost of Tsushima (especially since I don't care too much about graphics and FPS, more like at all). Ghost wasn't on sale, but Ragnarok was and it also meant a good motivation to re-play the first one.

I know I've been talking about the 2018 game as if it's 4/5 (and it is), but sometimes 4/5 is more than 5/5, if you know what I mean.

Downloaded both games and going on the journey of the Boy.

(man, between God of War and Red Dead 2 being all "boy! boy! boy!" all the time, I fear I soon might never use the word again, going for "lad", or "young man" or "son" or even "child of masculine make" instead)
 
Just started playing Syberia - The World Before. The original Syberia game is a point n click adventure game classic. I loved playing all the Benoit Sokal games back in the day (Paradise, Last king of Africa etc) and it was super fun to jump back into an adventure/puzzle solving game again in 2024. Still early days but already feel the story is very deep and probably going to be an emotional ride.
 
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