I’m 100% for Ciri being the main character and I’m also complaining “what about the lore”. You can do both at the same time. There’s a vocal minority of people who’ll use the lore argument to be sexist assholes, but people who have actually read and understood the books can have some valid concerns (ie where and how did she go through the trials, why can she use magic again, where did she even find how to do the trials, and just… why? She didn’t need them and it’s a bit of a character regression. She was basically already a witcher by title.)

I’ve reinstalled Sims 3, because I wanted to play the Sims but just can’t deal with the broken cash machine that is the Sims 4. It took a decent amount of effort to get it to run, and it doesn’t run very well, but it mostly works. And… it’s so good. I forgot just how good it was.

I’m amazed at how much there is to do, and just how well my sims can take care of themselves - when playing 4 I always just made 1 or 2 sims, so that I could control their every move bc otherwise they’d be stuck doing something useless on a loop. Here I can have a family of 4 and actively play just one of them, and the rest will cook, clean, do homework, and generally look after themselves while I’m not there. It’s amazing how they had this figured out so many years ago, and regressed so horribly.

Recently released Wayfinder has been scratching that itch for me! It used to be a multiplayer live-service game, but during early access it got converted to a normal singleplayer/coop game with 0 microtransactions and it’s a lot of fun. My only issues are with performance, which isn’t great, and build variety, which doesn’t exist. There are 8 characters with limited customization (except visual, you can do a lot with all the dyes and trinkets) and you just gotta rotate between them to keep the playstyle fresh.

But the combat is fun, the graphics are great (they aren’t beautiful, but they have that timeless cartoonish high fantasy aesthetic, like early WoW), and there is a lot of stuff to do and reward chests to collect. It really is feeling like a new KoA to me - as you said, just a solid, mid-tier action RPG.

So considering that we’re in patientgamers… add to a wishlist and wait for a sale? :P

I don’t think so, considering that it was written in 1999. And it’s just way too specific for something LLM would come up with.

It is fun, but buggy + doesn’t have great performance in some areas. I’ve recently played it for a bit on 1.1 patch drop, and lasted for about 6 hours until I hit a brick wall of a progression blocking bug. There was a decently large thread about it on the forum, no dev response, no fix in the next 3 hotfixes, so I stopped playing. Might come back for 1.3 or something.

Yeah, one of the only games I’ve 100%ed, the achievements are deliberately set up so that you can get most of them organically by the time you get to the true ending. The rarest achievement on Steam has like a 6% obtainment rate, which is a lot.

I’ll be a contrarian and throw in my vote for the second game - it’s rushed and flawed and the asset reuse is blatant to the point of being legendary, but the setting and story are the best and most original of these 3 games. Just being a hero of one single city instead of the entire world is surprisingly refreshing.

In general I’d say that 1 has the best combat/tone, 2 has the best setting/story, 3 has the best characters. I’ve heard that 3 can be quite enjoyable if you pretty much only do the main story and companion quests - but I wouldn’t know, I’m one of the poor fools who got stuck in the Hinterlands, and that mistake + the very underwhelming main story sapped my will to continue playing.

The 2 hour refund window is for automated refunds, you can still make a request if you’re past that - it’s just going to need a human to take a look at it. I’ve once succesfully returned a game I’ve played for about 5 hours because it had game-breaking bugs and ran like crap for no reason, and it got accepted within a day without an issue.

So Helldivers owners have a chance. I’m assuming that Steam’s Customer Support department is having some kind of an internal discussion right now on how to handle this case.

I had a N3DS, it was my first handheld and it was great! Really good selection of games. My most played were Monster Hunter Generations (which was my introduction to the series) and Fantasy Life - one of my absolute faves, a charming and colorful fantasy adventure with life sim elements. The story is a bit meh but the gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying and there’s nothing else quite like it. I’ve been replaying it on an emulator (rip Yuzu/Citra devs) recently and it’s still a blast.

…wait, you just throw socks onto the pile without putting matching pairs together beforehand? I’ve learned that an alternate universe exists, and I’m not okay with it.

The spices are pretty good - great, portable money source that won’t get you killed for being a witch. Everything else sucks.

I have a T450, I’m dual booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu (…I know, I know, I’m just too lazy to swap) on it and it works great, I get better performance on Ubuntu than I do on Windows. The fans worked oob.

Nothing quite like Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but farming games/life sims often fill this niche for me. The classic one to recommend is Stardew Valley, I also really like Graveyard Keeper, Slime Rancher and Fantasy Life (3ds, works well on emulators).

ARPGs (Diablo style, so kill stuff to get loot to get your numbers up to kill bigger stuff) can be nice zone out games too, I recommend Grim Dawn (going to get an expansion soon, quite complex), recently released Last Epoch (very enjoyable, but might want to hold off for a while if you want to play online - the servers are a mess right now), and Chronicon (most casual of these three, very cheap, colorful explosions across the screens).

Other games I’ve tagged as “Space Maintenance” : Planet Crafter (pretty chill number go up/building kind of game where you’re slowly making a planet livable), Deep Sixed (short roguelike, try to keep a ship together enough to get through the game, very hectic and no progression between runs so may not be what you’re looking for), Delta V Rings of Saturn (top down space mining).

Not mentioned yet: Chronicon. A small indie game that doesn’t take itself very seriously. It has much less build variety than something like Grim Dawn (obviously) but it’s got some, and it’s aiming to be a much more streamlined/casual experience. Won’t demand as much of your time and attention, will deliver hugely satisfying colorful explosions across the screen. When I’m in the mood for an ARPG it’s a toss up whether I’ll install this or Grim Dawn.

All of them, honestly.

The Crucible is the weakest - it’s just an arena mode, but it’s got a lot of utility for speed leveling new characters + some QoL for existing ones.

Ashes of Malmouth is the direct continuation of the base game’s story, adds Necromancer and Inquisitor which are both very well-loved masteries, and you need it for Forgotten Gods anyway. The zones are a bit meh - great overall mood but you spend a lot of time in cramped corridors.

Forgotten Gods adds Oathkeeper (very fun) and tons of huge new zones with a refreshingly different vibe to the rest of the game. And you can go to this expansion’s zones from the start! (Except that you probably shouldn’t on your first playthrough, you’d get destroyed and you probably want to focus on the main story anyway.)

I’d wait for a sale and get them all if you like this genre, or just base game + AoM if you just want to give it a shot (and technically you could hold off on AoM until you’re close to the end of the campaign).

Something kind of adjacent to this happens in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series. Aliens come over to fix the Earth and humanity, but decide that human nature is part of the problem, and set out to modify it. It’s a really interesting read.

Just finished Lies of P. My hands are still shaking from fighting the final boss, that one was a nightmare, took me 3 hours of attempts.

Still, this is a great game for fans of Soulslikes - more of an iterative improvement than anything revolutionary, and not as thematically interesting as Fromsoft titles, but a very polished experience. Really good boss fights.

I’ve finally decided to give Cyberpunk 2077 a shot, deciding that it has had enough time in the oven, and… yup. I’m happy to have waited all these years to play something that’s a finished product, runs well, looks beautiful and is engaging and fun to play. Honestly I spend half of my time in this game just walking around the city - it’s the first city in a game that feels realistic, with all the street markets, food stalls, drunk people wandering the streets at 4 am…

BG3 was overall the best game I’ve played this year though.

I would like Persona 5 Royal, never really had a chance to get into this series but I’ve heard good things!

Maybe Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente? Her Orphan’s Tales have some interesting cities too, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

Again, not just one city, but take a look at Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - it was a direct inspiration for Fallen London.

China Miéville might be worth checking out - go for either the City and the City or for Perdido Street Station.

I grabbed Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Sleeping Dogs Definitive Editon, both of these are supposed to be great on the deck! Still stuck in Packaged purgatory though, so it’s going to be a while before I actually get the chance to play them. There were some other games I was considering, but I gotta stop spending so much money right after buying a new piece of hardware… One day Sekiro will be at 70+% off, and that is the day I’ll buy it.