Just finished it with all achievements (except final Takezo fight, yet) in about 50 hours. It was a little repetitive yes, but it didn’t bother me much. The setting, presentation and gameplay checks all the boxes for me so I kept going.

But I would’ve also been happy if it was shorter. That’s my general opinion on games these days.

I bought into the review hype, bought the game, then realized about two hours after the Steam refund window expired just how tedious this game felt to play.

I really wanted to like it, but it stopped being fun and started being so tedious that I uninstalled it.

I absolutely agree with you, I got to a point where I had solved the “main” puzzle, but was struggling to complete other puzzles (that I knew the solution to) simply due to room draws.

I wanted to love the game, but it held itself back on the RNG design. It can be so detrimental to the game that I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.

The game makers had no respect for players’ time.

I don’t know that game, but the importance of respecting the player’s time cannot be overstated.

I wish more game makers understood this and prioritized it accordingly.

Soulmask. Its been phenomenal even in EA, and its about to fully release before the end of the year. Once Human is also fantastic and its free.

Kinda the same, but I did like slay the spire. But balatro is leaps and bounds superior.

For me, deep rock really shines when you’re playing the higher hazard levels. Seeing a wall of the cave move because it’s covered in enemies, and then hitting them with a fat boy gave me happy chemicals.

Very fair, I had a lot of fun with it as a casual game to relax with. Not so easy it’s trivial, not so hard it needs a lot of thinking.

I don’t know how I managed to have gone through the game as long as I have. I got it for free when it was a giveaway on Epic. I feel that’s exactly the right price because really, it’s just an almost do-nothing but move slightly and just pick options kind of game. Got boring fast.

It started being really ridiculous when I got one character, a skeleton that threw bones, up to the point where all I see were just numbers, gems and other flying things from the abilities I picked. It just got comically stupid but still boring at the same time.

This game’s entire premise, was that it’s supposed to give you feel-good moments without having spending money like you normally would on mobile games. It behaves like a mobile game without MTX. But I think its problem is that it retains the other problems that mobile gaming has than just MTX, such as time-wasting, cheating you of your dopamine and all that.

I picked it up and thought “this is so stupid,” right before spending many hours playing it.

Try out Magic Survival, the (way better) game VS was copied of

That’s because you’re playing it wrong. You see, at it’s core Skyrim is actually a puzzle game you play on the Nexus Mods website. You spend 30+ hours carefully researching, building, and tweaking the perfect pack of mods, only to immediately run out of interest in playing Skyrim once you’re finally done. The actual Skyrim installation only exists to check if you solved the puzzle correctly and it runs.

I have the opposite opinion. I avoided it for years because of the hype (and not having proper hardware to run it).

Now I have almost 900 hours in it, and sometimes I jump in just to walk around and revisit some places.

Yeah. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I got into it and finished it. Once I realized that you’re expected to die and respawn frequently, and you don’t lose anything when you do, playing went a lot better.

I still don’t get that decision, because Doom has never been like that. Even arcade games don’t do that. It just felt trivially cheap at that point.

The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn’t enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn’t sit with me. I haven’t tried Dark Ages but it seems like it’s doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.

I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing. I think it’s brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.

I love the fuck out of dark fantasy. The problem is that while souls-games and Elden Ring, are drenched with dark fantasy elements, the game execution itself just didn’t appeal to me at all. I just don’t like the idea of tediousness mixed with a scale of difficulty where all and any progress of mine are just dashed because a slight misstep.

All the souls games. I don’t get it

They’re memorisation timesinks

There was a time when I could not have imagined liking those kinds of games. My partner got me Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition and I hated it. Hate may be too kind a word for how I felt. I’ve always loved metroidvanias and the style seemed right up my gothy, witchy alley, but I couldn’t get past the first basic zombie.

Then we watched a bunch of videos and realized that the game was designed to be played slowly and deliberately. There were no “junk” enemies and paying careful attention at all times was the game. When it clicked, it clicked, and now From Software games are my favorite.

My first attempt was Dark Souls 3. I went in expecting challenging but rewarding battles, and a mysterious world to explore. Unfortunately, I found myself bored within an hour every time I played, and gave up on it after maybe a dozen sessions.

I tried Elden Ring maybe a year or two later. I stuck with it for longer, but the experience was roughly the same. The combat felt tedious. The art and animation didn’t appeal to my tastes. The world seemed big, but desolate. The controls somehow made me feel awkwardly disconnected from my character. Nothing about the game made me care about it at all. The biggest challenge was in keeping my eyelids open.

I wonder if I would find soulslikes more appealing if I had grown up on console games. They’re clearly popular, but it seems they just aren’t for me.

Souls games didn’t make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon’s Souls. Mechanics that I didn’t know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of Soulslikes, but none of the ones made by FromSoft. Their style of providing poor explanations of mechanisms just makes no sense to me, even if you want to give players those moments of self-driven discovery.

2024 is even worse. On top of that, they also stack extra abilities, and try to give everyone everything.

One of these days I should try Pathfinder

I think this is one of the reasons why Pathfinder 2e has been doing so well.

It’s a middle ish ground and it feels good to progress.

My current issues with it are how underpowered the items are. So boring.

5e character progression does feel kind of bland.

I feel the 5e rules are poorly organized, too. Lots of interdependent rules scattered far from each other in the books, and sometimes buried in the middle of seemingly unrelated sections, so unless you’ve memorized multiple chapters, understanding how to resolve common situations sometimes requires stopping the game for 15 minutes while someone digs through the books to find all the relevant factors. Even when you do find the relevant info, it’s often in ambiguous language describing what could have been made perfectly clear with a few keywords. The books are pretty, and the text might be nice to read for entertainment, but they’re pretty bad the the job of being game manuals.

Does 3.5e use the d20 system? Does it have the advantage/disadvantage mechanic? I like those aspects of 5e; they’re simple and they help keep games moving along.

Maybe I should give it a try. Or perhaps 4e, which I have read does a better job of clearly defining its gameplay mechanics.

3.5e being the best is an opinion I’ve heard for my entire life. I would say preferring 5e is a more unpopular opinion.

I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.

I liked 4e the best.