Coelacanth

That’s fair enough, but I really do recommend going into NG+ after too even if you start over from the beginning. It’s a really fun twist, and also streamlines things quite a bit so the NG+ run will be much faster than your first playthrough. And it has an exclusive ending! I’m so impressed with this game, I can’t wait for the sequel.

Did you do NG+? It had one of the best NG+ implementations for me, so much fun. God I love that game. I really hope the sequel is a banger.

I mean, I love atmosphere to be clear. Several of my favourite games stand on the foundation of atmosphere, like STALKER, Cyberpunk, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Dishonored… Withering Rooms that I played recently was dripping with atmosphere, which is part of why I had trouble moving on from it. Limbo does have good atmosphere but… its atmosphere is kind of one-note, like yeah it’s spooky shadows but that’s all there is. It’s neat, but it’s not really wowed me to the extent that it really elevated the game for me or anything. From what I’ve heard Inside has a bit more of a story to it, a which makes me hopeful I’ll like it better. Artsy indie platformers can work for me, I really liked both GRIS and INMOST.

I think we’ve already been over it before, some time last year when I played Limbo. I’m not a huge fan of puzzle platformers in general so it starts as an uphill battle. There were one or two puzzles I liked (like the anti-gravity stuff was cool), but most I didn’t for various reasons. Most were either frustrating or forgettable. The liquid stuff was a bit overused. Towards the end it got a little too precision platformy and timed for my liking, some with really tight and unforgiving timing. Although I recognise that some people might enjoy that. Story wasn’t really anything either. It’s a cool mood and some decent looking scenes at times but apart from the graphics and art it almost felt like a browser game.

I finished Withering Rooms last week, and finally managed to tear myself away from it instead of doing a third straight playthrough. I’m still low-key obsessed with this game and am now waiting anxiously for the upcoming sequel. What a piece of art this game is. Beautiful art direction, beautiful music (all composed by the solo dev!), great gameplay despite the clunky combat and just such an interesting world and story, with some thematic throughlines of morality and responsibility running throughout. Possibly also a commentary on generative AI. It’s a super well made, super interesting and captivating game and I can’t recommend it enough. Death Howl I moved on to Death Howl as my next main game. It’s a Soulslike grid-based strategy deckbuilder (yes, that’s a mouthful) and so far it’s been… Decent but mixed, I’d say. I love the art. Beautiful pixel art in a very minimalistic but expressive style and a distinctive muted color palette. The story is okay but very very obvious and predictable, so while it’s a classic template and theme I am not really excited about getting to the next bit of story as I can already tell where it’s going, what it’s about and how it’s going to end. The gameplay is fine so far, although the game is quite grindy which I don’t love. You need to do a lot of trash fights to grind out your deck for each area, and there is a mechanic that increases the mana cost of cards from outside your current area, which means you have to regrind a deck for every new area. It also means creativity in deckbuilding is restricted, as you really kind of are just limited to building one of the two deck archetypes provided by each area’s cards. There are also some QoL features I don’t love, such as disabling fast travel while doing quests, which just means you waste enormous amounts of time walking. Overall it’s interesting but I don’t know whether I’d recommend it, outside of diehard deckbuilder fans who have already played everything else. It’s also fairly difficult. Ninja Gaiden 4 I got derailed in my playthrough weeks ago, but have picked it up again and am probably in the final third now. I’m playing it in parallel for whenever I need something faster paced. Not much to add about it that I haven’t said previously. I have a ton of gripes with it, and it feels more like a half-brother to the older 3D Ninja Gaidens than a full blooded family member, but in isolation its combat systems are phenomenal, it’s fast and it’s fun and free-flowing and if you like action games you should absolutely play it.

It’ll probably be my next intermission artsy short game between longer titles. Did you play Limbo? If so how do they compare? I thought Limbo was only okay but I’ve heard people say Inside is a stronger game.

You can also try Chrono Ark if it gets stale, which I feel compelled to proselytize for every time roguelike deckbuilders come up now. Incredible game and super underrated somehow.

I’m exposed as a filthy console user XD *glass shattering noises*

Oh… I didn’t realise you were on console. I highly doubt it :( I’m pretty sure save files are encrypted to prevent cheating, at least on PlayStation.

Ah damn that sucks! :( I’m sure there are save files to download at various points from the internet, but that’s not as fun either I suppose.

Yeah that would be fantastic.

I forgot to ask the other day. What happened to your DS3 save?

Chrono Ark I went back and finished Chrono Ark. Well, okay, I still haven’t won a run with every character yet and I have some DLC content to get to if I want. But I reached both endings and the epilogue. Which, as a note for anyone who gets this game because of my recommendation: your game might bug out and unlock the epilogue before you’ve seen both endings (it did for me and I sadly started watching it unbeknownst before reaching the second ending). Try to avoid watching it until at least after seeing the second ending, or it won’t make a lot of sense. Though having watched it now it really would make the most sense after having reached golden friendship with all investigators first. Anyway, I really loved this game. I’ve already waxed about it in these threads. The gameplay is really fantastic, and while the actual prose itself isn’t always the best (partially due to translation I’ve been told) I really enjoyed the story and several of the themes it touched on. It surprised me at several moments, and even with the prose sometimes lacking it still managed to land the big moments for me. I do have one small complaint, and that is in the marriage of cinematic storytelling and a challenging roguelike deckbuilder. Now granted, this might be exacerbated by me sucking at the game. But I did find the climax of the story somewhat frustrating since it took me a couple of attempts to clear the final two bosses. And that’s fine in a roguelike usually, you shouldn’t expect to win against the final boss on the first attempt. But here the story and the presentation was all laid out in a way that made the losses feel very bad - I just wanted to see the conclusion of the story. Especially since unlike something like a Souls game or whatever it’s not just like you can gradually work on beating the final boss. You have to invest over three hours into another run just to see if this time maybe your deck is good enough. Though I will say: there is a “Hope” difficulty meant for those who just want the story, and maybe I should have used that when it was time to see the endings. So it might be partially user error. Having gotten that off my chest though, it still does nothing to tarnish my overall rating of the game. It’s a phenomenal roguelike deckbuilder that will appeal to anyone who likes the genre purely through gameplay, and on top of that it’s a full fledged visual novel with an actually surprisingly interesting story. I will definitely keep playing it, maybe I won’t 100% it but I would like to explore the DLCs and try out some of the team setups and combos I still haven’t tried out.

I honestly don’t have a dedicated fidget toy. I have a leather phone case with a magnetic strap and I use that. It’s pretty satisfying to flick the little strap open and shut and listen to the little noise of the magnet snapping it into place.