Skua

This title format is gonna be great in six releases’ time

To be honest it seems like they’re so paranoid about The Woke™ that it would be almost useless. It would just be a recommendation for every single game that has a plot and wasn’t made by dickheads

Is 30 fps not playable?

That’s fair, it is slow and often clunky. I am personally totally fine with the pace of it, but I get why it wouldn’t be for everyone.

To me, the ship navigation stuff was there to make the setting feel bigger and lend weight to the plot rather than the puzzles. I personally enjoyed stopping off at unexpected things I found along the way, or figuring out how to get to some of the less-accessible worlds (the marketplace at the very top left of the map stands out to me here). I’m okay with it not being a tightly-focussed puzzles-only sort of thing

Edit: possibly relevant, apparently the game had some pretty bad bugs with the navigations on launch. I played it after those got patched, so my experience may have been different to yours

That’s fair, I can definitely see why it would be an acquired taste

I really enjoyed Chants of Sennaar. Heaven’s Vault is also worth checking out for those that liked it; it’s by an independent British team, the language puzzles are similar but (in my opinion) a bit more involved, and there’s more narrative & character stuff going on. It is not as smooth a gameplay experience as Chants, but it’s manageable to get cool puzzles

Noita and Baba Is You are both brilliant games from a few Finnish people. Baba Is You is a puzzlegame involving rearranging the rules of the puzzle you are in. It will make your brain hurt in the good way. Noita is a roguelike in which you are a witch and you build wands with the spells you find along the way. You can make ludicrously powerful wands with some creativity, and the game is ruthless enough that it basically demands you do so.

I’ve already mentioned Heaven’s Vault elsewhere here, so I’ll plug A Highland Song from the same British indie team too. It’s an exploration / climbing game with some simple and really cathartic rhythm sections. The visuals and music are gorgeous

Assetto Corsa Evo! And probably also Assetto Corsa Rally, depending on when that’s done. However I am unlikely to get much on release as I have plkenty of unplayed stuff that I really want to play already

The Paradox siren song is an alluring one

Been having a lot of fun with the Exo Rally demo. You go rally raiding in a big six-wheeled sci-fi rover with RCS thrusters, but it’s absolutely still leaning towards the sim end of things so you’d better be conscious of the terrain and take good care of your vehicle. The rally raid format (meaning there’s not a defined course, just a series of checkpoints you have to reach by whatever route you choose) gives it a layer of strategy too, as you get a limited window of time to survey the stage with a drone before you drive. The demo only has one area and one type of rover at the moment, but the area is pretty big and there are three challenges with different routes each day so there’s actually heaps to do given that it’s a demo

On a much less serious note, RV There Yet with friends has been really entertaining. Drive your somewhat ramshackle RV across some progressively sillier and sillier terrain, nailing bits back together whenever you launch it off a big drop or a bear decides you have lost vehicle privileges

I mean, I only have so much money free to spend on hobbies. I will gladly support indie devs when I want a new game, but I’m not in a position to just be buying them for the sake of buying them

Only if you assume that its performance will continue improving for a good while and (at least) linearly. The companies are really struggling to give their models more compute or more training data now and frankly it doesn’t seem like there have been any big strides for a while

I’m never going to actually watch any of the live action Popeye horror films, but it is funny that we immediately got three of them

Man those games are great. I recently-ish tried out one of the decompiled versions of the original after the source code leaked. It’s still a lot of fun

What you describe is a huge part of vehicle racing in general. Getting into a flow state is fast. If you can stress an opponent out enough by threatening to overtake or even just keeping up, you can very often push them to start taking bigger risks and to drop out of that flow state

Funnily enough, if you do really well in a specific mode of some of the Wipeout games, you do indeed get a rating of “zen”

The SC kickstarter was 2012, but it started development in 2010

Star Citizen has been in development since before both GTA V and goddamn Skyrim released

!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works

Em dashes are definitely a less reliable sign in professionally written and edited articles. That’s the context where actual humans will use them most often

I haven’t played the Outer Worlds, but isn’t a whole lot of it about making fun of companies doing this kind of stupid shit?

Based on a quick look at some videos showing off the max settings, it doesn’t even look like it’s doing much with all that demand. It looks like a completely normal big budget game