Last weekly thread of March!
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Still playing Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs. In chapter 5 now, I should be more than half done. Still enjoying it.
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Finished Jotun: Valhala Edition. I was playing it a few weeks ago, but took a break at last boss. Finally went back and finished the game.
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While I am enjoying Regalia, wanted something more action-oreinted, so looked at my backlog and started Neon Chrome. I am generally not a roguelike fan, but I like twin stick shooters, so started that. Not sure if I’ll actually finish this, but enjoying it for now.
What about all of you? What have you been playing?
I’m in Tears of the Kingdom. I am almost ready to face DKG, but I need to hunt some Frox to upgrade my Depths Armor. I wish it didn’t have a KKK hood though.
Finished replaying 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim!
Goddamn, I love this game. If you like story-focused games I can’t recommend it enough.
Finished Touhou Luna Nights!
I know almost nothing about the Touhou universe, but even without knowing the characters I had a ton of fun with this game.
Combat is fantastic, and it’s challenging without being too frustrating. Exploration is a bit too linear, but overall I really appreciate seeing a recent metroidvania game that is not just following the formula set by Hollow Knight. The only bad I thing I can say is that the the game is really short, there’s no in-game timer but it definitely took me less than 10h to get 100% completion.
Finished Ori and the Blind Forest!
There’s a lot of good things and a lot of bad things going on on this one.
Production values are great, the world is very interesting, some stages are quite unique, and most puzzles are well designed. On the other hand, for a game with a lot of focus on platforming the controls don’t feel quite right - they’re kinda floaty and weird, it’s easy to miss platforms when jumping (or even more strange, when climbing them from the side), wall jump sometimes doesn’t grab and you’re not quite sure it didn’t work… Maybe I’ve been spoiled by games like Mario or Celeste, but I sometimes get an impression that I’m fighting against the controls in this one.
Combat is underwhelming, but that’s not really the focus on that game. Also, you’re going to die A LOT, and even with the mechanic that lets you save almost anywhere this can get annoying.
Playing Balatro!
So after hearing a billion people commenting about this game I picked it up, and I can confirm it’s as fun and addictive as advertised. Not that hard as far roguelikes go, I had my first win somewhere around 3h of playtime and managed a few more already.
Playing Crystar!
Early impressions on previous posts.
I’m bored with this game but I still want to finish it, so I’ll playing it slowly and sparsely. Not sure how long it’ll take, and probably won’t mention in future posts unless I hit some relevant landmark.
Added Touhou Luna Nights to my wishlist, I am leaning towards shorter games these days, so 10 hours to 100% sounds really good to me.
Didn’t expect to hear bad things about Ori, I haven’t played it yet, but the universal acclaim it gets, I was expecting it to be near the perfect / masterpiece level.
No! You started Balatro! We are going to lose you! Nooooo! Come back!!! … How is it if you aren’t into poker? Since everyone describing it mention poker, I didn’t even look into it.
Maybe take a break from Crystar for couple of weeks? Might reinvigorate some interest.
Added Touhou Luna Nights to my wishlist, I am leaning towards shorter games these days, so 10 hours to 100% sounds really good to me.
It’s a fantastic game, my second favorite in this genre in recent years after Axiom Verge. Worth mentioning that it can be quite hard at times, in particular at bosses, but I feel it gives you more than enough tools to learn their patterns and beat them.
The protagonist’s time-manipulation power is really neat, you have the ability to slow or even stop time for short periods which is handy when you’re stuck on “OK, so how the hell do I dodge this attack”. There’s also a “grazing” mechanic that lets you recover HP by getting close to the enemy or their bullets, which you can use to recover mid-battle if there’s a particular attack pattern you can’t dodge perfectly.
Didn’t expect to hear bad things about Ori, I haven’t played it yet, but the universal acclaim it gets, I was expecting it to be near the perfect / masterpiece level.
I’m now playing the sequel and having a much better time, though it does lose some of the uniqueness of the first game in favor including more common elements seen in games of this genre.
How is it if you aren’t into poker? Since everyone describing it mention poker, I didn’t even look into it.
Balatro to me is a card/deckbuilding roguelike that just happens to use the poker rules because people are familiar with those and it helps shrink the learning curve.
The focus is not getting the best poker hand, but rather on finding a strategy that maximizes the chips you get with the tools you’re given each run. I just had a very successful run where I build a deck solely focused on getting “Two Pair” hands all the time.
I’ve been playing a lot of Tetris 99 again…
I was playing Huntdown as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. But I got bored. The boss fights are challenging, but once you get the pattern, they go on for too long and you lose a lot and it’s just boring. In higher levels they get quite annoying. I’ll eventually finish it since I’m on the (apparently) last level, but it just drained my patience. Other than that the game is pretty good.
I should get back into Super Mario RPG or Tears of the Kingdom soon, but I’ll probably get distracted with other games along the way 😅
How’s Jotun? I got it on an Itch sale or something, and haven’t played it through yet.
I had forgotten that Tetris 99 is still a thing. How good are you?
You played Huntdown X, right? How would you compare Huntdown with it?
Jotun is good, it looked like a fast paced hack and slash, but it’s more on the slower and methodical side. The story isn’t much, but the voice over in Norse really add to effect. There are five “worlds”, with 2 levels in each, you have to collect runes on both stage to get access to that world’s boss. The stages aren’t much of a challenge, but are different from each other so you don’t get bored of them. Though the main attraction of the game is boss fights IMO.
The game isn’t too tough, but I think it will appeal to the crowd that like souls-like, without detracting people who don’t.
I’m ok at Tetris 99, not a pro but have managed to win very few times (with a bit of luck involved).
Huntdown I played the one on Switch, just “Huntdown”. I remembed you mentioned X before. Is it the XBox version? I couldn’t find it.
Jotun sounds good, I should check it out.
Lots of Mario Kart 8DX and just finished Super Mario RPG
I play MK 8DX in phases. Would ignore it for months, then will play it for few weeks regularly, clearing tracks I don’t have 3 stars in. Then will put it away again for months. Still have lots of tracks to go through.
How did you like Super Mario RPG?
kinda the same, honestly. Just turned on my Switch months ago, renewed my subscription and got hooked again.
RPG was fun. Haven’t played the original one, tjough. Music, enemies are OK- Haven’t played the endgame, if there’s any.
Difficultywise, it was fairly easy and light game, but didn’t expect else 😄 or maybe I did too much grinding.
So, I liked it. Though not sure about that 60 EUR, but oh well.
Super Mario RPG. Fun game. Looking forward to tyd. I could not afford the full price but our local library has them all.
