Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?
2026-08-05 13:30 UTC
Replies (6)
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@emb@lemmy.world 2026-08-05 23:41
Replaying Zelda: A Link to the Past this week. Been kinda of a busy/stressful week, so whisking my way through a comfortable favorite to relax.
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@Elextra@literature.cafe 2026-08-06 00:48
Unpacking and Hungry Horrors. Both great games!! I’ve also been doing one Sonic Generations stage a day :D When I’m done with those I’ll move into Shadow Generations!
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@christian@lemmy.ml 2026-08-06 03:21
I’ve started a monster taming game called Anode Heart and it’s good stuff so far. There’s a lot of depth to the gameplay, somewhat nonlinear with a strong story anyway. It came out about three years ago. Comparing to other indie monster tamers I’d definitely put it above Cassette Beasts, not sure about Monster Sanctuary but it’s much less well-known than either and deserves to be.
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@YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 2026-08-06 03:42
Gave away shadow complex after I saw I had a key for it but it was already on my account. So I’m kinda playing through it with the person I gave it to.
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@Goodeye8@piefed.social 2026-08-05 22:06
Patient gaming, Blasphemous. Not much to say about it. I enjoyed the pixel art and the world building but found the gameplay somewhat janky and maybe partly because of it also hated most of the boss battles. I haven’t fully completed it, the in game progress meter gives me around 70% done and I’m just looking if I find the motivation to push it to the finish line. But I’m more stuck in my not so patient gaming game. Not patient gaming, Witchfire. Blasphemous left me with a dark fantasy itch so I was looking for something to scratch it with and I remembered Witchfire had a major update a month ago. Now to talk about Witchfire itself. Witchfire is a game by the former developers of Painkiller (for those who are ancient enough to know about Painkiller) and is about a fictional church vs witches war where you’re the church assigned “preyer” (witch hunter) who has to go and recover a lost relic from an area controller by a witch that may change the tide of war. Thematically it’s a dark fantasy and while I’m getting some Dark Souls vibes in some of the gameplay elements I feel like there’s much bigger inspiration taken from Bungie with the emphasis on verticality, impressive vistas and tight gunplay. As for the gameplay, if we were to be genre fluid it would fit in the extraction shooter genre. You go on expeditions into one of the 6 maps to gather resources, level up weapons, explore the maps, do quests or progress the meta progression and when you’ve completed what you set out to do or you feel like you no longer have resources to continue you go to an exit portal and effectively extract. The game very much has every aspect of an extraction shooter except for the multiplayer PvP and it will never get that because the developers have been very clear it will be single-player only. I guess technically there’s also no time limit for how long you can stay in the expedition but there’s a late game mechanic that you can interact with to ramp up the difficulty to a point where sticking around becomes extremely dangerous. The gunplay feels really good. Not as good as Destiny 2 but for me it comes very close because it’s one of the very few games where I can easily intuit how my character moves, where the enemies are and which shots will and won’t land. I have no idea what micro interactions are happening there but the moment to moment gameplay is so satisfying for me. The only exception is when enemies are so close that the particle effects are having a full-on rave on my screen and I can’t see if I’ve killed everyone or if there’s an enemy about to attack me. It’s still in early access with a release around the corner (last roadmap that was released a few weeks ago had a late Q4 2026 release window) so it’s not patient gamers ready, but I think it’s definitely worth putting on your radar because I genuinely think it’s also worth the $40 price tag. I bought it when the 0.8 update came out and had fun but ultimately put it down because the late game mechanic (world corruption for those who have played the game) was a difficulty spike I wasn’t expecting and it sucked the fun out of it, at least for me. I was going to skip to 1.0 but like I said, Blasphemous gave me an itch and Witchfire was going to scratch it. And I’m glad I didn’t wait because I experienced it first-hand that the developers are taking feedback from early access and they’re actually listening because with the 0.9 release I was blown away how significantly they altered the the late game mechanic. It went from something that forces difficulty to ramp up to something you can choose to interact with and if you do it doesn’t just ramp up difficulty, it also gives you a few choices to power up yourself as well. So a mechanic that at first was just something to make the game harder became a mechanic that makes the game more challenging. This on a whim decision to play Witchfire has made it one of my most anticipated releases of 2026.
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@Drasglaf@sopuli.xyz 2026-08-06 15:17
I advanced quite a bit in Alan Wake 2: spoiler I finished Saga’s content, or at least as far as they’ll let me go: The concert at the lake. I have to say, Tor and Odin are my favourite characters of the franchise, with Ahti coming in second place. And I got to see Ahti a lot in Alan Wake 2, love it. Saga’s not so bad in the end, but I don’t manage to fully connect with her, I still find most of her story unnecessary. I found Casey’s story more interesting, to be honest. With Alan I just watched Zane’s lost film, the tension prior to that point was constantly building, and there is no immediate release. Now everything starts making sense, I think. The ritual to lead you on, he comes back while you stay in the room, it’s not a loop, it’s a spiral… Zane is using Wake to get out. The real question is: who is Zane? In the original game he is a writer, here he’s a movie director. And when Alan meets him he’s surprised he looks like him. Is Zane Scratch, trying to fool him to write a story to be able to escape? On the other hand, someone comments on Alan not knowing who he really is. There are still more questions than answers, but this is as far as I’ll get. Yesterday I screwed up. I decided to move from Fedora to Tumbleweed, copied Alan Wake 2’s saved games in a folder… and they’re not there. So I wiped my NVME and lost my saved game, I’d have to start over, but I’m not willing to be honest. I guess I’ll watch the rest on YouTube. I’m quite disappointed but now I have to choose another survival horror from my backlog. Titan Station: After finishing The Invincible for the second time, it reignited my love for space-themed walking simulators, and I had this one waiting for me. The storytelling is a bit awkward, and the voice acting is not too good, especially the main protagonist, who sounds like an amateur person with a regular mic recorded it. In fact the credits give a nickname, not a real name, unlike the rest of the cast. But it’s a chill game and it looks quite good on my CRT, and the story isn’t bad in itself. Just the way it’s told. Now I’m looking for more similar games, we’ll see if I find more.