What digital games are you playing?

[DeepCandle Games]

what's Exile Princes? it sounds good!

I've just been playing a bit of AVP classic 2000 today, and also some Stone Shard

[Jubal]

That's the Strategy-RPG I'm making Single player windows game, slightly crappy graphics, has some roguelike elements.

[Jubal]

I've just finished Black Geyser today: it's a new CRPG, very much along the classic sort of Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity lines. I'm not sure how strongly I can recommend it: it has some good points but a couple of big downsides.

Technically, the worst downside was that it clearly had some sort of memory hole: there was a lot of lag which got worse as sessions went on. It seems like not everyone experienced this though, and otherwise the game is fairly smooth. Wizards, like in other CRPGs, get a "too many buttons" problem at times and tend to have too many AoE spells which makes them a bit hard to use at times at higher levels without frying your own party.

In story terms, it has some very similar beats to other games in its genre in that the primary concern is The Gods Doing Shenanigans, and you get closer to the plot as various cults and intrigues interact to spread chaos which will herald the wake of the Great Evil Scheme Of The Week(tm). The story is competent, I had a big double take at the end because it turned out I'd been getting two really really important deities and their bizarre cults mixed up for the whole game because they were both somewhat not-good-aligned women deities with mysterious evil cultists and names beginning with the letter Z. The difference between them is quite important in the endgame though!

In the setting as a whole, the 'Rillow' people of the setting's Eastern Empires were something I found grating because they're just a ton of stereotypes bundled together really badly. Everything from the related spell class being called "Oriental" to the merchants deciding that their major conversation topic is how much less sand there is in Isilmerald, to their god Elenuator being presented as jealous and vengeful as opposed to the just and fair pseudo-Christian deity Alnarius, to them generally being shown as decadent merchants and little else, to the mix of visuals, it just... grates on me pretty hard, honestly. It's not helped by Siracca, the main Rillow companion who's a convert to Alnarius' faith, who shows the Rillow at their worst in their reactions to her and who reinforces all the Isilmerald conceptions about what they're like.

The dialogue writing I think gets a bit better as the game progresses, and hits some of its better beats in the late game. The 2d art I would actually put as a standout feature - it has very pretty loading screens and nice character portraits, consistently extremely solid work and very impressive. Sidequests are fine, and all contribute to an overall greed mechanic though the effects of that weren't hugely clear to me. There's some nice character stuff in the late game though it could've done with a bit more of that, and a bit more intra-party interaction probably. So overall it was fine, a decent use of time if you've played all the big to medium titles in the genre already, and I hope the problems are fixed and the devs make more, better games, but if it's between this and playing BG1/2 or Pillars, play BG1/2 or Pillars, I guess is my current advice.

[Jubal]

Been playing Mordheim: City of the Damned, and I think I'm giving up on it after a few days.

It feels like they spent a lot of time making a turn based tactics game that was more detailed than I remotely wanted and involved a lot of trying to stack quite small bonuses in a complicated skill system whilst playing really quite slowly - and conversely not really enough attention feels like it was given to narrative design. Fights tend to end up in large brawls with a lot of clicking through standard attacks: winning and losing them rarely feels earned. And then on top of that there just isn't a lot of heart to the game. I could barely remember half my own characters' names, which is REALLY unusual for me in a party/warband game. Nothing in the game really encouraged you to engage with them and their background. It was fine to play for a bit all the same, but it wore on me pretty fast unfortunately.

[Spritelady]

Tis not a very 'serious' game but I've been playing Dreamlight Valley lately. I quite like having something a bit silly and quite relaxing to wander through in the evenings when my brain has had enough of thinking hard about Things. Has anyone else played it? Particularly after the update of a few days ago, I've found more things to explore and I'm enjoying that.

[Jubal]

I haven't played it, I've only vaguely heard of it - what's the basic pitch?

Vicorva on Twitch has been playing The Wandering Village lately which looks good (post-apocalyptic city builder where you make your village atop a giant dinosaur monster that you can either feed or exploit), so I'm wondering if I'll get that at some point.

[Jubal]

I have been playing a City Builder recently, but not the one aforementioned: rather, I've been playing Frostpunk, a game of depressing authoritarianism, victoriana, big steam robots, and a lot of cold. Like, a lot of cold. The low temp point that you have to survive to win the main scenario (which I've now completed once) is an astounding minus one hundred and fifty degrees celsius, which is arguably a bit silly and unarguably really quite nippy. Enough to kill someone from southern England in a few breaths, or get a northerner to get the big woolly jumper out.

I was glad I played it. It leant really, really heavily on the grimness of the setting, probably too much: the setting was for the most part so unrelentingly grim that it sort of ended up numbing you to the human tragedy of the decisions being made, whereas playing up some of the moments of joy and hope in there would have let the tragedies feel more real. There are lots of city-builders where that wouldn't matter, but it feels like Frostpunk really wants you to care about the morals of what's going on, especially in that part of the game's outcome narration focuses on how far you went down certain parts of the tech tree and whether you "crossed the line" to discard too much of your humanity in the pursuit of survival. As such I think that it needed a bit more on the roleplaying and emotional texture element: an easy win would have been the ability to name particular buildings and areas of town, because having the Coal District with St. Barnabas' Infirmary For The Woebegotten in it would be much more engaging and indeed easy to remember than "uh, there's that cluster of buildings up top near that pair of mines". All that said, whilst I think the narrative could have landed harder, on a purely aesthetic level it absolutely nails the job: the UI is good, the soundtrack will be rolling like a winter storm through my head for weeks, the whole thing looks the part very nicely, and so on.

In terms of the gameplay and core narrative, the story of the main scenario is simple but effective, and the gameplay is pretty harsh but that actually usually helps hammer the point home, especially on resource scarcity. It does a bit less well with the social mechanics, because a lot of the "hits" to those feel pretty arbitrarily forced by game conditions, and effectively designed to try and force you to use whichever of the authoritarian paths you chose, which doesn't really feel like it ought to be necessary when you're actually running a completely tight ship economically, everyone is eating well, warm, has good housing and healthcare, etc. I'd have been interested to see Purpose paths for Popular Will (get hope via a more demanding democratic populace, at high material costs: the more extreme use of the tree has citizens banish others and demagoguery/populism) and Technology (get hope via technical enhancements, but with more and more ultimately being done by the Engineer class potentially at the expense of the workers) as well as Faith and Order.

The general mechanics were really smooth and I got on well enough with them: I enjoyed the exploration elements, the cutscenes were very pretty, and the range of challenges was generally good. The "faction challenge" section in the middle was my least favourite because, again, really arbitrary penalties - I thought the storm section at the end felt like a pretty good finale even if the -150 temperature felt a bit OTT. I may well try some of the other scenarios, though I think I'll possibly play something else first - we'll see.

[dubsartur]

I remembered the classic text game A Dark Room which I play every few years http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

After a connection on Mastodon I am trying https://www.improbableisland.com which is a kind of MMOD or text adventure

[Jubal]

I looked at Improbable Island too, for much the same reasons - thanks for giving us the shout on that, I'll be in touch with them soon once we've worked out a banner image. The game is pretty bizarre, but enjoyable in a very silly 00s-y sort of way. I feel like there's less of that kind of flat surrealism around than there was then, or what there is feels like a throwover. High surrealism in games and media nowadays feels like it's often focused on the dark twist - things like Cyanide and Happiness games or webcomics - whereas something like Improbable Island or a comic like Station V3 which is more purely surrealist, has a much more 00s feel, to me. But that might just be me?

[dubsartur]

I was defeated by some Purple Prose after finding too many Supply Crates and overloading myself

[Jubal]

What distinguishes purple from other colours of prose?

[Pentagathus]

I've occasionally been playing a little of the Divide and Conquer LOTR mod for Medieval 2, because TW peaked with Med2 and nothing will ever be as good again so we might as well all give up wooooooo

[dubsartur]

What distinguishes purple from other colours of prose?

It wants you to join its writing circle.

[Jubal]

After last weekend I feel I really ought to go play Pentiment. But also NWN2 is high on my list. I don't think I'm so stoked by Oblivion that there's a big deal of stuff I want to do in that beyond what I already did... Hmm.

[Pentagathus]

After last weekend I feel I really ought to go play Pentiment.