My Mommy bought me a Nintendo game for Christmas and I’ve been playing Metroid Prime 4 all weekend.
Still playing Turtle WoW, been having fun with guild recruitment since I recently finished the druid quest that lets other players ride on your back in epic travel form and have been giving people reindeer rides and passing out gold / bags to new players. Hoping we’ll have the head count to get back to Kara 40 here in the next month or two.
I realized I haven’t really finished many games in the past few years, fuck that. Combined with me watching a shit ton of a leftist brazilian gaming journalist turned youtuber, tvPH, I decided to change that.
So right now I’m playing Control (immaculate vibes so far), Kingdom Come Deliverance (holy bad performance, had to install a mod to run this well), Chrono Trigger (first time playing it, this game is great, I’m emulating the DS version on my Switch), Absolum (love the artstyle and the gameplay so far, also Galandra is cool as fuck), Hollow Kinight (Pure Vessel is kicking my ass) and Megabonk (great as a podcast game).
I got back into pso, trying out ver 2 for windows, some fans have tweaked it to play on winblows 10 and there’s a private server for it.
Finally finished Expedition 33. By the end I was not enjoying it nearly as much as I was at first, I was playing it mostly because I wanted to get to the end of the story and move on to ARC Raiders and Baldur’s Gate 3.
Overall I did enjoy it, although I cannot see why E33 cleared all the GOTY awards. I mean, it’s a fine game, very well made, and you can see how it was kind of a labor of love for the developers. It looks gorgeous, the voice acting is absolutely top notch and it has a very unique and interesting setting. And the soundtrack… goddamn what a thing of beauty that is.
The combat loop is fun, although it does get repetitive at times. I didn’t like the balance very much, though. It feels like most of the time I was either overleveled and facerolling everything, or hopelessly outmatched, pretty much never anything in the middle. I got to Act 3, unlocked the damage cap, and thought “hell yeah, time to rough up some Chromatics” and promptly got my ass handed to me like I was back to level 1.
Some of the parry windows are absolutely bullshit, but you can learn how to do it fairly consistently by the end of Act 2, I suppose. I only say “I suppose” because I brought the difficulty down to Story mode and found the windows in that mode much more enjoyable.
I do think that this game is pure torture for completionists, though. I got fairly competent at the gameplay loop by the end, but unless you’re a min-maxing freak, you will not be able to defeat Simon, the secret Malenia-ish boss that’s supposed to be the hardest fight in the game.
As for the story, I thought it was a bit of a mixed bag. As I said, the setting is tremendously creative and unique and I found myself pretty invested in the characters by the time I got to the end. I did not see the main twist coming, also. And that’s why I thought it was kind of disappointing when…
spoiler
The final choice is to either let the main character be tortured indefinitely in a fake world or kill god only knows how many people in order to finally give a French aristocratic family closure over the death of their son. It was a sort of not only moral, but also emotional dilemma that I felt was very unsatisfying. I wish there was an option in which Verso finally gets to rest in peace, Maelle faces her grief in the real world alongside her family, and everyone in Lumiere gets to live.
I suppose that’s too much to ask, and would break the “tough choice” at the end, but I dislike it when my two options in the dilemma are equally unsatisfying. I do understand that it’s a story about grief, and I suppose that asking for a more satisfying conclusion is exactly against the point that the story is trying to make, but I do think it could have been handled differently.
Anyways, very good game, but I don’t think it’s GOTY material in my view.
I did agree that Baldurs Gate 3 lived up to the hype back when it released and was deserving of goty and from the outside it seemed a similar situation with Expedition 33.
I havent played Expedition 33 and im not in a hurry to do so. The general reception seemed very positive though. Im curious what would be deserving of GOTY in your opinion ?
Like the only real contenders I could think of that seemed to have somewhat similar reach would be Silksong or Kingdom Come deliverance 2 (which to be fair got both nominated) but I cant comment on either since I havent played them.
This is not me saying E33 has to be GOTY Im just curious what or which titles you have played 2025 that you would consider on that level .
Honestly, I’m not sure. I actually had to go and take a look at a “best games of 2025” list to see what I would pick from and I haven’t played most of the games on the list. If I’d played it, probably Hades 2 would be a solid contender, judging by how phenomenal the first one was, but out of all the games I played this year the only one that came out in 2025 and I would qualify as Best Game material is likely ARC Raiders. It’s a ton of fun, the gameplay is very solid, it also looks amazing, but the sound design of that game is insane, unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a game.
It’s a tepid endorsement for GOTY, for sure, but… I don’t think there was much else on my radar the whole year.
Getting back into Project Zomboid now that build 42 has been updated for multiplayer. Pretty good time. We got generators hooked up before the power went out and have a nice little compound set up with cows and chickens. I am really hoping they add horse riding and dog companions for the full zombie apocalypse with spaghetti western characteristics.
I played eu5 as portugal up until 1512 but i noticed my trade income just absolutely fucking exploded right around when I forced Morocco to relocate its market to my provinces in Granada so i restarted intending to do that right off the bat except for some fucked to death reason when Morocco gets called into war to help Granada I can’t fucking even request to steal the market from them. So i just took fez and 3/4 of the province and im the most powerful trader in the Fez market, good enough I guess
I fucked up though because I went 1300 ducats into debt to build hospitals everywhere and still couldn’t afford one in Fez and then I spent like 20 ffucking years paying it off when i maybe should have just hit the bankruptcy button
Path of Exile 2. The druid is fun
I’m staying entirely away from whatever the community is talking about and mostly just playing solo, hour or two a day after work. It’s a good time. If people are mad at the game or something rn, I’ve got no idea
Finished Kingdom Come Deliverance! Fun game despite the jankyness and sometimes-poor writing.
Started XCOM: Enemy Within again, i had played almost a full campaign years ago but never finished it, so i’m playing again. I tried a couple campaigns before i really got back into the groove, I was losing countries which frustrated me, and I tried classic once but the change in percentage chances immediately pissed me off. Normal is fine for me. Haven’t lost countries so far but i’m mega-prioritizing satellites this time.
Aww heck aww beans I’m still playing Baldurs Gate 3
Started playing it a few days ago, what a banger of a game this one is. There’s just so much stuff to do, I can easily lose a couple of hours to it if I’m not careful.
Its one of the cases where a game absolutely lives up to the Hype.
League of Legends… I’m not sure what I’m trying to do by grinding away at it, but I am! Hoping to get to grandmaster before end of season. This was much easier when I was a broke uni student. It’s funny how much I dislike Windows - I’ve only kept a 100 GiB partition so I can play League in one of my SSDs, how much I dislike the League of Legends community and all of their bullshit, but I still love the game.
I’ve also started re-playing Katana Zero now that we have a TV, love the soundtrack. I enjoy playing levels without using the slow time to a crawl feature. Can’t comment too much about the plot though, I remember enjoying it back when I had originally played it, but I really couldn’t care less about misery war story number N+1 that does not critique capital.
Last but not least, some Animal Crossing. My girlfriend really wants me to get more into it, but I don’t think the gameplay loop is for me. Maybe I’m just not a cozy games enjoyer.
I got many games for Christmas. Too many games for Christmas. They demanded I give a list of games I wanted and then they bought them all. This is good. Except it’s also bad, because I’m still not through the games from last Christmas. But I got pocky and rocky reshrined for PS4 which is a remaster/reimagined pocky and rocky game. And so I’ve been playing that mostly.
Also metaphor refantazio, which I’ve been on a week break from because Christmas and shit. Hopefully I can get back to it now and finish it off in a month and dig into all the other games I got.
The other games I got? Clair obscure 33, khazan first berserker, ever space 2. I need a vacation just to dig into these games.
Got myself a PS Portal really cheap for Xmas.
Been playing Cyberpunk, Stellaris and Lawn Mowing Simulator.
Cyberpunk remains up there with No Man’s Sky as a top-tier comeback story. Utter trash when it came out, a masterpiece after Phantom Liberty. Legit from zero to one of my favorite CRPGs of all time.
Got the PSVR2 for Crimmas and been playing through Resident Evil 4 VR. Kinda silly it’s locked to the ps5 but it’s super fun! I usually don’t do horror games much but RE4 is more action-y and somehow the removed aren’t getting me as bad as when I’m playing at a computer for whatever reason. Probably because I’m the scariest thing around (a dual knife wielding gremlin)
Last Call BBS is amazing when I understand how to play the games lol. Genuinely no clue how the food court one works but I want to figure it out. My favorite is probably the mini painting one but I also had a good time with the different versions of Solitaire.
Oh yeah and Megabonk’s got me pretty good. I am very bad at it.
Im currently testing my new CPU (on Mint btw) Ryzen 7 9800X3D 8 Core and Im seeing frame rates that used to only be spoken of in legends of the old ones
Still on my Warframe bullshit, hit LR5 finally and now I’m mostly just grinding out SP Perita Rebellion every day until the event ends to grab lenses and the new tauron strikes. Got a Hildryn build that goes pretty hard now, though for some reason the damage against bosses seems to be way worse solo. Getting kinda annoyed that around 1/3 of players just don’t even attempt to play the objectives. I could play the missions solo, but I’d like to have some other people around doing their own thing.
Also playing Clair Obscure when I have time, but I’ve been busy so I only have about 12 hours (just fought the Dualliste in Act 2). It’s alright but not living up to the hype imo. Fuck Gestral Beach Volleyball.
