What digital games are you playing?

[Spritelady]

Forgot to add what I've been playing lately! I recently finished replaying Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (as part of my mission to replay all three games back to back), and have restarted a playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom for the comfort of making Link wander around picking mushrooms and cooking tasty meals. At some point, I'll actually get around to playing one of the games on my endless list...

[Jubal]

Kingdom for the comfort of making Link wander around picking mushrooms and cooking tasty meals

Collecting mushrooms is the only correct way to play any game in which you can collect mushrooms (I say, as someone who mostly spent his first main playthrough of Skyrim collecting mushrooms)

[The Seamstress]

I have found my people. Hooray for collecting collectable things in games 

[Jubal]

Tuco (our friend from northern Scotland who comes to pub but not on the forum usually) has been trying exasperatedly to train me out of picking up everything that can possibly be picked up in computer games for some years. It hasn't been a very successful process, except in that I've gotten slightly more efficient at it to reduce other people's annoyance :p

[The Seamstress]

Tuco (our friend from northern Scotland who comes to pub but not on the forum usually) has been trying exasperatedly to train me out of picking up everything that can possibly be picked up in computer games for some years. It hasn't been a very successful process, except in that I've gotten slightly more efficient at it to reduce other people's annoyance :p

You can't train the collecting out of the collector, that's rule number one in the collecting business! lol

[Spritelady]

I also tend to pick up everything in sight if it is collectable. I recently played Wytchwood (strongly recommend, excellent game about being a witch trying to break a curse on a sleeping maiden. Surprisingly cosy) and picked up everything in sight. I believe at the end of the game I had something like 150 thistles surplus to the MANY required over the course of the game

[The Seamstress]

I also tend to pick up everything in sight if it is collectable. I recently played Wytchwood (strongly recommend, excellent game about being a witch trying to break a curse on a sleeping maiden. Surprisingly cosy) and picked up everything in sight. I believe at the end of the game I had something like 150 thistles surplus to the MANY required over the course of the game

That sounds fun, I like witchy things! I just added it to my wishlist

[The Seamstress]

Playing "Rabbit Simulator" Digging up and collecting carrots to carry them back to my burrow, and eating greens to get energy. I've encountered other rabbits but don't know yet how to interact with them.

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[Jubal]

I've encountered other rabbits but don't know yet how to interact with them.

Very realistic socialising mechanic!

[The Seamstress]

Very realistic socialising mechanic!

Right? (Admittedly I feel like I have more knowledge of rabbit social behaviour than human social behaviour, so I hope to at least succeed in the former.)

[The Seamstress]

Good news, I seem to have made a friend. I don't really know how though, lol. They follow me around now and I need to give them carrots to keep them happy (?)

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[Jubal]

Giving food to friends is indeed often good for keeping them happy

At my end, I started playing a bit of The Temple of Elemental Evil, but haven't got far with it yet. The characters are a bit characterless, which is often a problem in make-your-own-whole-party RPGs, but hopefully the narrative will be interesting when I get into it more.

[Antiquity]

At my end, I started playing a bit of The Temple of Elemental Evil, but haven't got far with it yet. The characters are a bit characterless, which is often a problem in make-your-own-whole-party RPGs, but hopefully the narrative will be interesting when I get into it more.

ToEE was one of the best tabletop conversions at the time, but turn-based has made a big comeback since then.  How does it hold up against newer games like Solasta or Wrath of the Righteous?

I've been gorging on (mostly indie) games since Minerva Labyrinth released.  I won't list them all, but there were a couple that came out on the same day as ML that I really liked.  Idosra: The Electric Renaissance is a platforming action-RPG with influences from the classic cinematic platformers, and Pepper Odyssey is a surreal survival adventure-RPG with a unique visual style.  Both are great and worth your time.

My splurge for the Steam winter sale was Tevi, a bullet hell Metroidvania and semi-sequel to Rabi-Ribi.  I like it a lot so far.  Also checking out King's Bounty II from my backlog, which I'm also enjoying.  I'm not sure why it gets so much hate, but maybe I'll find out.  It is definitely a step in a different direction, but I feel like the core formula is still there.

There's an indie JRPG dungeon crawler called Empire Reunited that I helped playtest.  I played through once in November and a second time this past week.  I really enjoyed its no-filler playtime and good balance of challenge and story, and it's been fun watching it improve from its early state.

Dungeon Antiqua 2 came out, but I haven't played it yet.  I really liked the first one, so I'm looking forward to it.

I've had some letdowns as well, but I feel weird calling out tiny indie games and this post is probably long enough, so I guess I'll leave those for now.

[Jubal]

ToEE was one of the best tabletop conversions at the time, but turn-based has made a big comeback since then.  How does it hold up against newer games like Solasta or Wrath of the Righteous?

I can't tell you for a couple of reasons: one is I've not played the latter games, Kingmaker was so bad it put me off the Pathfinder games and I never got into Solasta partly because it felt like you needed about eight DLCs to get all the basics of the game down. The other is that I sadly didn't finish ToEE because it turns out even the "remaster" is so full of bugs it's unplayable, I got as far as Nulb but the game wasn't letting me resurrect my party without throwing CTDs and it just stopped being useable at all.

After that I played Legends of Eisenwald which is Fine I Guess. Also a DNF though. It has a slightly King's Bounty style of one party on a fairly tracked map with locations to visit, and focuses on turn-based combat with very small maps and parties. This is fine, but the turn-based combat is actually quite annoying and slow and the game's plot just wasn't good enough to get me through it. It sells itself as being all fantastical stuff in medieval Germany, but having played through the whole tutorial and first map it wasn't leaning hard into that, and instead it was mostly me dealing with various vassals, which was again alright but most of the time was spent in slightly pointless fights to scrape together money and XP. The plot twist at the end of map one killed my interest a bit because it was so badly written, I tried doing a few fights in map two but I'd lost interest.

I don't usually do a lot of not finishing games, but maybe I'm getting more discerning about how I spend my time. Anyway then I played Fallout 3 which I'll post about in the Fallout thread.