Played and finished Stick it to the Man. It’s an old game from 2013 (2017 on Switch) by Zoink games, which later merged with Image & Form to make Thunderful games.
It’s a side scroller platform, where you have a giant hand coming out of hand, which you can use to jump around or read other people mind. You need to solve some puzzle and bring people things to move forward.
A small game, can be completed in 4-5 hours, very humorous though. Highly recommended to anyone who like weird / funny games.
After that, played and finished Metro 2033 Redux, oldest PS4 game on my wishlist. While I enjoyed the story and narrative, I didn’t like the game much, maybe because I am not a fan of survivor horror.
I watched the story of the next game Metro Last Light but didn’t play it. Will probably try Metro Exodus since I have heard it has switched to more action gameplay.
After all that, I am back to Trails in the Sky: SC, this is now my primary game, though it’s a long one so going to take me couple of months at least to finish it.
Since that is on PC, I also needed a game on Switch and PS. For Switch, I started Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout. It’s my first Atelier game, and I have pretty much just started it, but it seems nice. Very chill, cozy crafting JRPG, without any doom and gloom (yet).
For PlayStation, I started Dust: An Elysian Tale, had it from PS+ ages ago. It’s a 2D metroidvania JRPG. Also, only started it, but it gives me a bit of Vanillaware vibes.
So, it may seem like I played a lot, but basically just finished 2 small games and started 2/3 games. And since all these games are pretty long, I’ll probably be playing them for next 2-3 months.
What about all of you? What have you been playing
I’m a huge Atelier fan, Ryza is definitenly a nice starting point for those new to the series.
One thing worth mentining is that the beginning of the game is a bit slow, and I recommend focusing on the main plot until you unlock the fast travel option as it makes doing the side quests a lot more enjoyable.
Playing Harvestella!
Since I don’t have any games in my wishlist for the next few weeks (next one is Ys X at the end of the month) I decided it was a good time to play a longer RPG.
Despite this game’s marketing focusing on the farming/slice-of-life aspects that doesn’t seem to be a huge part of the gameplay loop - sure, there’s plenty of things you can do to build/expand your farm, but I’m only spending a small portion of the game’s day/night cycle doing some chores on the farm and after that it’s going out into the world for quests and monster killing.
That would not be a bad thing, weren’t for the fact that combat in this game is rather mediocre. It’s not horrible, but it’s slow, lacks some things that seem obvious in an action RPG like a dodge button, and has some serious issues with the enemy lock-on system. I’ve seen people argue that it’s more of an “Offline MMO” battle system like Xenoblade instead of a real Action RPG, which I don’t think is what the developers were aiming for but may be a good approximation of what the game really plays like. There’s some good ideas at least, like the idea of having multiple jobs equipped and hot-swapping between them based on the situation, which offers good customization for different playstyles - I’ve been enjoying to focus more on ranged combat with the mage class and letting the NPC allies do the tanking for me.
There’s also some technical annoyances, one being the performance which is usually tolerable but had some pretty massive framerate drops in one boss, and other being the visuals - I’m not usually picky about that, but at least on the Switch it looks incredibly blurry - reminds me of Xenoblade 2 on portable mode, only it’s like that even when docked.
Those two are rather big issues making it hard to recommend this one, which is unfortunate because I’m loving several other aspects of this game. The worldbuilding is great and unique, the story is slow but doing a good job keeping me interested, I love the character designs, and there’s plenty of activities to do if you need a break from combat.
I just unlocked fast travel, about 7-8 hours in the game. The game is pretty chill even now. Enjoying it quite a bit.
Harvestella is on my wishlist. Maybe the combat isn’t that great cause they were going mainly for farming side, and didn’t pay too much attention to it. Sad to heard about the performance and visuals, specially cause it’s console exclusive to Switch, so it’s not like they made it for more power consoles and then ported it to Switch.
Older titles have time limits to add a bit of pressure, but plot-wise those games stay chill 90%+ of the time.
It’s one of the reasons I like them so much, I find the mix of a chill atmosphere, addictive gather->craft loop and fantastic OSTs incredibly relaxing.