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“I Just Think They're Neat.” Like What You are Playing

Paul le Fou said:
Umberto Eco "Medicine cabinet" approach
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I looked this up as I couldn't recall exactly what this meant, and continue to think it's great.

Consider books as medicine: it's better to have a well-stocked 'medicine cabinet' of books at home rather than just a few. When you need comfort, insight, or inspiration, you can reach for the book that perfectly suits that moment—not a random one, but the right one. That's why having a variety of choices is so important.
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I don't think anyone else here plays, but a friend of mine recently convinced me to give The Bazaar a try and I've become absolutely obsessed with it. It's an asynchronous PvP tableau-building autobattler and most of those words don't innately appeal to me, but it's just such a satisfying tableau builder that everything else is secondary. There's just always interesting decisions (all of which are made under zero time pressure, since the PvP matches are just the capstone to each choose-your-own-adventure style tableau building "day"), and such a breadth of build variety that I'm still trying fun new synergies 100 hours in. It's a real "just one more run" kind of game, and I just one more ran myself into the top PvP rank for the first time this season.

It's got kind of a weird troubled history where it tried a few different monetization models, but the current model, where you buy the game and then play it as much as you want for free but buy additional characters as (admittedly overpriced) DLC and all the older monetization levers just spit out cosmetics, works great for me, and the 3 default characters already provide near endless variety.

Anyway, it's a real good, real unique way to scratch your system optimization itch! If you're the same brand of sicko as me, I highly suggest giving it a try!
 
I've been playing Windswept, and I'm slowly realizing that it's really something special. It wears its Donkey Kong Country influence on its sleeve to a comical extent, but I think calling it a DKC homage is selling it short. It feels more like a platformer that exists in a world where DKC went on to form the basic language of platforming, but it expands and iterates upon it in so many clever and intricate ways. Plus the levels have an astounding amount of environmental and mechanical variety, and the map is just beautiful. It took me a couple hours to really get the hang of the tag-team controls, and they still trip me up a bit from time to time, but the overall experience of playing the game is such a treat.
 
I’ve been watching my boyfriend play Control after previously playing it in 2019 for like eight hours or so, and I genuinely think it’s incredible. Fantastic game.

Also the new 2025 update with 120hz support on consoles and the PS4 exclusive Hideo Kojima DLC on all platforms is great. I also think the controller support is pretty good even if I genuinely think it’s a more fun game on mouse and keyboard (which my bf agrees with). He thinks that it’s interesting that the game has a lot of toolkits to approach it with an entirely different playstyle on controller than mouse and keyboard.

The assist mode is cool too, which allows you to adjust a bunch of options for accessibility and even enable bullet magnetism for enhanced aim assist, all without locking you out of achievements too.

All in all, this might be my favorite game of our Remedyverse playthrough (minus Quantum Break*) so far.

*it’s not part of the Remedyverse, but have had friends tell me it’s a particularly bad photosensitivity risk compared to the other games.
 
zonetrope said:
I've been playing Windswept, and I'm slowly realizing that it's really something special. It wears its Donkey Kong Country influence on its sleeve to a comical extent, but I think calling it a DKC homage is selling it short. It feels more like a platformer that exists in a world where DKC went on to form the basic language of platforming, but it expands and iterates upon it in so many clever and intricate ways. Plus the levels have an astounding amount of environmental and mechanical variety, and the map is just beautiful. It took me a couple hours to really get the hang of the tag-team controls, and they still trip me up a bit from time to time, but the overall experience of playing the game is such a treat.
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Lol, you weren't kidding with the DKC influence. I saw a thorn maze and an underwater level, where they ride a dolphin. Haha, but looks great.
 
FelixSH said:
Lol, you weren't kidding with the DKC influence. I saw a thorn maze and an underwater level, where they ride a dolphin. Haha, but looks great.
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There's also the golden letters you collect in every level that spell out a word, the target you hit at the goalpost that makes the active character do a little dance, and the exclamation point that appears at the end of the level name when you've found all of the collectibles. And I could go on and on. The developers are not subtle about it, and it's very charming.
 
Been playing Road 96 before it leaves Gamepass. It's an adventure-y game about trying to escape a country run by a dictatorship. But what's interesting is that every run is something more like a rogue-like, you don't know which events/characters you'll see, but it's really engaging.

And while I haven't finished it yet I do feel like my choices matter and they have clearly affected the recurring NPCs in a few ways. I'm very invested in figuring out what's happening and hopefully improving the lives of the people in this country.

And of course the political and media creepiness of the party in power is even more relevant than when this came out in 2021. Only complaint I have is that the voice acting and editing is very low-budget. Until I saw the release date I was concerned it was AI voice, but it's just kinda bad sadly!

 
I don't think I could play this game. The video felt too real and disturbing. That's the point, of course, so well done.

Glad you are enjoying it.
 
Fantasian: Neo Dimension is an alright game. Very basic, at least in the opening hours. It very much is “RPG for Kids and Beginners”, though there isn’t anything wrong with that.

Anyone here played it? There wasn’t much talk about it online as it was stuck in Apple Arcade Jail for a long time.
 
Yeah I’m about at the midway point of it. It Definitely feels like one of the better class of PS1 era RPGs.

It’s helped a lot by the fact that the characters are all a delight and some of the innovations it brings to the table I absolutely adore
 
I got Fantasian for Christmas and have been playing it off and on. I'm about 6-7 hours in? It's fairly basic but has some novel aspects (filling up a dimensional bucket with random-encounter enemies until you decide or are forced to take them all on at once, and the directional aspect of attacks). I've been enjoying it as a lighter game between heavier games. And yeah, kinda feels like a lost PS1 RPG.

It's weird how they use TIE fighter engine sounds for the machine plague.
 
I kinda chalk that up to it being an Apple Games game first. Like it's designed to ease in RPG newbies who might stumble across it. But the setting and characters have been interesting enough to pull me along.

I also like how it constantly clowns on its amnesiac protagonist. It's very tropey but has fun with it.
 
I started playing it early last year, and I was very into how it looks and feels, and then I immediately got distracted.
 
I’m about six hours into Fantasian now, and it’s very charming. The environments consisting almost entirely of real dioramas is a neat spin on the pre-rendered backgrounds of PS1 era games. Just a pleasant videogame all around.
 
Still enjoying Fantasian. It is absurd, though, how you don’t get access to the character’s growth chart until halfway through the game. Imagine not getting to use the Sphere Grid for the first fifteen or so hours in FFX.
 
Imagine having to wait a long time to gain access to Alltrades Abbey.
 
It barely needs to be said but Donkey Kong Bananza lives up to the hype. It's good to have challenges but a monster that turns into a glorious rainbow bridge when you punch it is something I didn't know I needed.
 
Downloaded the demo for The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales. Only has about an hour worth of content but it was enough to guarantee a purchase in June. It reminds me of classic Zelda and Ys: Oath in Felghana, pretty much in equal measure, with some Alundra thrown in and, for good measure, a strange vibe that kinda reminded me of Secret of Evermore, of all things. A new HD-2D game that reminds me of some of my favorites? Yes, I think I'll be having that.

It isn't perfect (because nothing is) - I'd really like to access more of the secondary weapons at once instead of only having the ability to equip one at a time, and the ability to simply pay for a rez may neuter the difficulty, but neither of these are dealbreakers. There's also some minor graphical things I'm not a fan of but I wouldn't be surprised if those are barely perceptible in handheld on the Switch 2. I'll be grabbing it on PS5, though, so I hope some of those items are improved and even if not, they were not bad enough to take me out of the game.

I've already thought about playing it again which is probably the highest praise I can muster for a demo.
 
I played that demo but got to some caves and didn't seem to be triggering/finding what I should. I got bored of wandering around and falling through the same areas and gave up. Maybe I was having an off week and missed something obvious.
 
If it's that cave with the little guys that dig underground and the fire sprites, yeah, there's a progression to it. You have to fall through the correct holes, clear some enemy rooms, etc. Also have to switch to the fairy's warp ability.
 
Surprising the shit out of myself, I'm quite enjoying Metaphor: ReFantazio. I'm only about an hour and half in but I may have to re-think my aversion to some of these anime-ass anime games; Tales Of this isn't.
 
I have never played a Persona, so that doens't mean much to me. Maybe I'll find out one day but, in any case, I'm having a good time with it.
 
Yeah, Persona games have a similar "limited things you can do per day" structure along with forging social links with various characters for benefit. Instead of jobs you basically have sets of abilities pegged to various Personas (kinda like summons/Pokemon/what have you), which the main character will have several of, and which party members will have one of. So the main character is a jack of all trades while the rest are focused on usually a specific element type or role.

Metaphor starts out that way as it introduces new characters and archetypes, but unlike Persona you can switch jobs for everyone.
 
I liked Metaphor a good deal, but I think the job system wasn't quite diverse enough. There were few-to-no lineages that really got wacky with the properties of the game.
 
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