I am thoroughly hooked on Slay the Spire 2 even though I’m getting my arse kicked as the Silent.
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it’s a tough game!
i was never great at sts1 but i’ve struggled with A0 wins.
i’m really loving it though, the new characters are great fun and i like the changes to the original 3
ironclad was fine, it’s just getting to the last boss of act 3 and finding some combo of vile that ends up being my downfall. i’m not quitting until i get that first a0 clear though.
The first Carmageddon 
Been streaming it and it still simply RULZ!
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Recently got really hooked on Kingsfield: Ancient City
The vibes are so…. magical
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I’ve spent many hours this week playing the new Path of Exile league, having so much fun.
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Enjoying Tyranny more now that I realized the lack of a class system and instead a focus on passively upgrading skills and the rune magic system where you mix and match symbols to make spells means it is entirely viable to do a punch wizard build. Since touch range sigils are so cheap in terms of lore required, you can buff them with a ton of modifiers to make them really nasty, so now I’m an extremely quick melee fighter that punches people and can also set them on fire very easily.
Still, I want to check around the backgrounds some more and decide on what I feel will work for me for roleplay purposes. A lawbreaker would be for an anarchist playthrough, a soldier for the disfavorered, ect.
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OMG, do you wanna dive deep into its lore? Cause I have videos for you if you have interest 
It’s difficult for me to understand the purpose of the “lore video” –having the ideas and experiences of playing a game repackaged into something more palatable and easily digestible, while losing all the texture of the experience in and of itself. I don’t really understand it… at that point, you’re not really enjoying the game very much anymore, just enjoying someone else’s echo of their experience playing the game.
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I do often enjoy other people’s echos, actually
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As someone who will go to great lengths to try to make sure I get the “intended experience” of a game, I think I understand this feeling. “Lore” in a game was made for a game and made to be experienced in that game, so why would I want to experience it in some other way?
I don’t really watch these kind of expository videos that often either, but I do every now and then, and it’s virtually exclusively for games that I’m already really familiar with, or with games that I feel that I’ve exhausted my desire to play, but still have curiosity about. Echoing (
) Bob’s comment above:
It can be interesting to see how someone else represents parts of a game from their unique perspective. I don’t think this is a gold mind of unique or super-valuable takes per say, but I tend to go into phases with games I really enjoy and spend a lot of time immersing myself in them. After finishing a game, videos made about the game’s content (including these kind of narrative expositions) can be pretty appealing.
And kind of conversely, if I played a game to satisfaction, a video like this could serve as a way to get a little more from it without the investment of playing OR as a way to re-spark interest into playing again.
“There was this whole other faction of characters in this part of the map you mostly skimmed over.” Oh that’s cool, I wonder what that was like? Does it sound interesting enough to get me to boot the game back up and get back in there (if so then I’ll likely stop the video as soon as I’m interested and go play) or is it just mildly interesting - I missed it and that’s fine but it’s nice to have a larger picture of the game.
The concept of exclusively consuming a video game’s experience through the abstracted explanation of another person (not even a let’s play, but someone talking about the game, its systems, its story, etc.) is something I would agree with your sentiment about completely - difficult to understand the purpose.
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Lore videos are fine for things like RPGs or any sort of live service thing drenched in details. There’s so much there that you may just overlook interesting things. Added commentary is also a plus, as is wanting to know about something out of curiosity but lack the time to invest in a given game because games are really, really long and I have a full time job!
As for Tyranny, I decided to do a lawbreaker who goes rebel and fights with punching and magic. It’s going great so far. Also helps I now realize that there’s new events in old areas on revisits.
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Indeed, every decision you make, during the Conquest stage influences the zones you will have access to on that particular playthrough. You cannot see the entire game in only one playthrough.
Hmmm, we may have slightly different ideas of what a “lore video” is. What and how I do, is to aggregate as much information as possible from within the game and then either connect dots, or speculate and theorycraft, within the rules and limitations of the game’s world. They are generally meant for those who have already played the game, at least once, and wish to explore the world in a deeper way, seeing as how you cannot experience the entirety of the game in a single playthrough. My videos answer the questions I had, and I imagine others had similar questions. When it comes to cRPGs, what you generally see on your first playthrough is only a fraction of what the game has to offer and unfortunately most peeps, will never replay the same game even if they finish it, in fact, most people won’t finish their games to begin with, let alone replay them. So for that majority of the audience, a lore video can help them contextualize what they remember from the game, or might even push them to actually replay. Of course, at the end of the day it’s a “de gustibus” sort of thing.
I always play CRPGs with some wiki searching and a guide so I very much noticed just from replaying the first act a bit. Current run, I decided to go to the mining town instead of Apex, and it did change a lot early with getting on the rebel path because of that lack of negotiation that gave me a rep before. Though, on the plus side, I’m already at loyalty 2 with Sirin and I haven’t even recruited her yet. I had to get to loyalty 3 with Eb by making a joke while talking with Tunon (he didn’t like that but I’ve been so well spoken with him and done my job so properly that I’m already at loyalty 4, and it’s weirdly cute how he really appreciates you asking for lectures on oppressive laws he’s in charge of).
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Heh yeah, Tunon is very autistic coded, which I appreciate, his hyper focus is very clear
Just played about an hour of Mama’s Sleeping Angels with some friends
It is another of the co-op horror “get loot see monsters” kind of games (see: Lethal Company, Content Warning, Kletka, YapYap, Murky Divers, R.E.P.O, Burglin’ Gnomes, etc.). There is a really strong creative vision here, though, and the game has a very super-saturated postmodern vibe to it (you can’t have a game like this without some real personal vision, but I think it also helps to stand out from the crowd as much as possible in this sub-genre).
I enjoyed my time a lot; I really like the environments. While I see a lot of comparisons to L.S.D. Dream Emulator to me it feels like exploring a particularly 2020s mutation of Kid Pix. While it certainly isn’t going for the same things as Fatum Betula, the dreamlike low-fidelity models and textures did bring that game to mind a few times.
I also had a good time seeing the variety of enemies and curses that can afflict you in this game. It seems like there’s a good bit of secret content to unlock and find that persists run to run, which is unique in this sub-genre.
My favorite thing about these games are the affordable price points; I don’t regret having tried any of them. I still think Lethal Company is the uncontested best and did it right the first time, but in a world where Mama’s Sleeping Angels came out first it might have been the star that kicked off the trend. It certainly makes a really strong first impression - not sure if I’ll play it more than a handful of times (my relationship with the other games I mentioned above) but I had a good time and wanted to share :-)
I’m not discussing any of the gameplay elements in here because I found them charming to see firsthand and discover, but so far it essentially plays like its contemporaries.
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Last night I beat the main campaign of Pokemon Legends Z-A. I had played it pretty regularly when it first came out, but slowly started playing less and less as it went on. Rolled up my sleeves to get through the final acts and had a pretty good time.
Now that I’ve beaten the game, I’m finding myself playing it much more as I try to catch every Pokemon. I was feeling pretty lukewarm about it by the time I beat it, despite a strong first impression, and now I’m enjoying it again. I think I didn’t really love the campaign missions/structure (even though I did enjoy the game’s characters - some of Pokemon’s stronger characters imo), but I did enjoy exploring and trying to complete other objectives, like catching every Pokemon or leveling up my team.
I really enjoyed Legends Arceus, which felt like it spent more time in this “explore at your leisure” state than Z-A did. In Z-A I saved basically all my rare candies and XP candies for the end game so I could start burning through my Pokedex, and I’m glad I did. I was a bit dismayed to see that there are 200 side missions, as I was pretty confident that I was getting close to having done them all when I hit 100 and they aren’t my favorite part of the game.
I’m going to do my best to finish the dex before I put it down. I’ll probably skip the DLC. I do feel like this one was one step forward two steps back for Pokemon, but I really appreciate them committing more to trying to iterate on the series’s gameplay. Very curious as to how the new mainline games will play.
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Bears in Space.
Remember Jazzpunk, it feels like that humor wise and play a retro futuristic FPS with ray guns and old robots. I LOVE IT!
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Nubby’s Number Factory. I am close to unlocking all Tonys and I just stumbled upon some broken builds. I just keep getting the worst pegboard jumbles in my runs 8’D
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