#Best Deep Rock Galactic Game

[new-one-games]

Deep Rock Galactic is the best three-player game it will connect with your family and friends. This co-op FPS game requires teamwork, strategy, and skill as you explore procedurally generated caves.

[nikkisticki]

There's probably not many people talking about Deep Rock on here, but DRG is being put into a freezer filled with meaty tendrils for 8 months (or more) so they can slamjam out a standalone roguelike version of the game.

I think a lot of people were already pretty confused by them having that secondary team making a Vampire Survivors clone, and the board game, but now we're looking at the game that few people are satisfied with the state of as the games best time is long past most dwarves. The best grinds are for Overclocks which quickly run out and leave you with nothing but grinding for cosmetics (90% of which are slightly different versions of beards). Add on that the game is being left on an event which I've regularly heard people say they'd prefer having the robots back (and everybody fucking hated the robots)

The general issue is that rockpox demands specific build types to overcome which ruin players desires as they need pinpoint damage, which then requires more attention and drags down the experience. Robots required heat, but heat was easy to obtain on many builds.

Not a good choice for several reasons, mainly that heavy combat wasn't the main draw of this game and ultimately will fracture it's own playerbase, rendering DRG drained of its more combat focused players on top of the slow entropy of players leaving due to BEING FUCKED BY ROCKPOX for 8 months.

Add on the fact that they are acting as if the ALPHA of this new game won't need continued effort applied to it, which means the main game will slow down even further, thus leading to the same problem of players leaving faster then they'll join.

This is not the way forward to keeping this brand growing, this is how you get elongated YouTuber videos talking about the good ol days. You don't want that.

[mathcat7]

2024 Gaming Retrospections

What a year huh. I won't repeat the opening spiel I did with last year's post (although much of it still applies), but this time around I'm armed with a few harder curveballs for things I've played this year that were new to me. In fact, I do need to warn now that two of the titles in this mix are visual novels that contain explicit sexual content. I'll be more specific with both when I get to them, but y'know, fair warning and all that. Additionally, while I'll try to keep the spoilers light, some of these games will inevitably cross that line, so again fair warning.

Let's get rolling:

Mice Tea

Cinnamon Switch

(Content Warning: This is porn vn 1 of 2 and contains some, albeit optional, kink delving into hypnosis, voyuerism, bondage, etc. Also it's at its core a furry transformation story.)

Yeah, this year I did make it somewhat of personal goal to stop acting as inwardly prudish towards the both the art I want to experience and want to support, and this visual novel was a great opener to that, especially with our point-of-view character Margaret.

Each of the main branches in the story sees her accidentally transformed into an anthropomorphic mouse (and/or other animal) and it's fun seeing her thrust out of her comfort zone in such a way where she confronts both that and all the other issues in her life (low self-esteem, being a doormat at her job). I had originally gotten this to play after a little in-joke with my friend, but the game is just genuinely kind about everything it tackles. Sure it's having fun putting Margaret in all these situationships with her boss, coworker, and other friends (and trust me on this its really good porn), but it also gives time to let all these people both grow on her and create some really compelling friction. Margaret's genuine distress about learning that Gavin's a furry in his route and that nearly creating a wedge in their budding relationship, was an incredibly strong hook for me. Which is wild given that by the end of it, I thought his route was the weakest of the bunch. By comparison, route that I've head anecdotally to be the general favorite by other fans is the one's with Margaret's boss, "Felix"; the magical properties of the tea are not just anthropomorphic, but also some extreme tier of HRT, and turns him into a catgirl. This leads into, among other shenanigans, a rather fast egg-cracking moment, as Margaret helps the now-Felicia navigate this new facet of her life. It's a super sweet and lovely storyline, and I love how much this route highlights the overlap between furry/therian and trans experiences. Oddly enough, what I find best about this is Felicia isn't even a token trans girl among the main cast; you get to see how much she contrasts to the more forwardly confident Sylvia, and some of the ways her route explores those aforementioned themes that a recent egg crack that Felicia can't.

I won't talk too deeply on the sex scenes themselves, but I found each of the scenarios well described, and (barring some oddities with Gavin's) well illustrated. Plus, even if I'm not into every kink Mice Tea provides, I do have to give the team at Cinnamon Switch props for how wide they throw that net; Margaret is an incredibly convincing vers, and I have a lot of fun reading her have fun.

This was a great opener to my year, and I would easily recommend this as a beginner piece for both people just starting out in furry culture or trying to get into more explicit pieces of media. (Heck, the game even has a SFW mode for the scenes that might turn you off, which is a nice boon.)

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor

Ghost Ship Publishing - Funday Games

This is gonna be a short coverage because I haven't touched it since February, despite it being an extension of one of my favorite co-op titles of all time. Promising take on what Vampire Survivors popularized, but given how early of an early access it was at the time I initially played, and that I don't think I was as into this genre as I'd initially hoped (I like more hands-on rogue approaches), I might have to wait a bit before I give this another go. (Ngl, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about this getting to publicly playable state a lot faster than the other DRG spinoff in Rogue Core, but that's really neither here nor there.)

Persona 5 Strikers

Atlus - Koei Tecmo

I think it's really funny that I'm now 2 out of 4 for playing spinoffs that involved Persona 5 without actually playing the main game. Beyond that though, I think this was a really fun Musou game for someone whose exposure to the genre thus far has only been through spinoffs (Hyrule Warriors, both the OG Fire Emblem Warriors and Three Hopes). The part I think it especially shines in is using P5's exploration-and-combat loop as the gameplay core, as opposed to being a full musou with Persona paint. It certainly fits the setting and the smaller cast of the Phantom Thieves (relative to those other spinoffs), and at least for me resulted in a lot less long-session fatigue trying to use everyone equally. If there's only one major complaint in terms of gameplay, is that Joker himself feels rather awkward to use at times due to how his wildcard mechanics are adapted here. I'm not even talking about how different personas contribute to his combo routing (though that is a factor), but the lack of deeper fusion mechanics such as arcana burst makes fused personas a lot harder to utilize as they will inevitably always be behind the experience curve. His starter Persona Arsene gets some unique bonuses in his later levels but it is straight up a herculean test to get him there. And while the game does have a catch-up system in Persona Points, you never gain enough points to where you can use it beyond sparingly.

Story wise, I think it makes for a rather well constructed continuation of where P5 left off (ignoring the elephant in the room of Royal's continuity). It's nice seeing how the Phantom Theives are continuing their lives—the former third years prepping for college, Futaba properly re-entering school—while also grappling with and re-interrogating their convictions with the new threats.

Also, the new characters in this story are amazing. Sophia, the A.I. designed to be humanity's companion, is equal parts adorable and heartfelt. Her sort of "robot learning to become human" arc has been done before with P3's anti-shadow suppression weapons, but it still takes that arc in very interesting ways, especially once her newfound outlook on life puts her at odds with her creator, culminating in a reinforcement P5's rebellious themes. And while I don't care as much for Zenkichi's arc concluding in the same sort of reformist slop that Makoto had in P5, the way his opposition of their methods giving way to mutual understanding, and the way his much more seasoned, fatherly life creates push-and-pull with the rest of the cast makes for a very welcome addition the Phantom Thieves.

Don't have much more to say since Persona isn't really my wheelhouse, but I for the most part enjoyed my time here, and am willing to bet anyone who loved P5 and hasn't gotten to any of its auxiliary media will love to see Joker and co. return to action.

Balatro

LocalThunk

Holy shit, this game. I'm honestly amazed to see how much this game blew up, given I was one of the early fans of it, back when it just a well constructed Steam NextFest demo in Aliensrock's wheelhouse near the end of last year. I don't know if there's much I can say here that does this game enough justice, but I would definitely argue for its GOTY contender status. It flips the script on what one would typically expect of a deckbuilder roguelike, much to its favor. Rather than utilize turn-based combat cards to defeat waves of enemies, it's a much more of an arcade-y score attack; match the required score with good poker hands to proceed. This is both a boon in accessibility of both appeal and mechanics; everyone knows what playing cards are, and you don't need to already have some foreknowledge in rpg/tcg style gaming to understand the core gameplay loop. Beyond that, the game is just oozing with strong design; the sound effects of gaining mult, flames burning on the scorecard whenever your hand one-shots the score requirement, a singular music track (with variations) that give a very zenlike sensation as you play, the lava lamp-esque backgrounds, even down to the gorgeous pixel card arts... the game just *feels* good to play. Additonally, since this game is a score-attack, this creates additional lines of play beyond the typical deckbuildrogue "beat the game with harder enemies, player penalties, etc." Some people just enjoy playing the game to see how high they can get the number to go, even to the point of where it becomes incalculable by IEEE 754 standards, and/or to see how many more blinds they can last in the game's Endless Mode (whose required score can also hit the IEEE 754 limit). I adore this game, and I hope that the waves it creates does foster new innovations within its subgenre.

Xenoblade Chronicles (Definitive Edition)

Monolith Soft

I don't think there's much I could say about this game (and its respective trilogy) that hasn't been said more eloquently or deeply. Anyone else with a relatively deep enough RPG repertoire can gush about the game's deep community systems, the story's powerful twists and turns, the close knit main cast, the jaw-dropping environments and music, or how sexy Dunban is. There's not really anything I could add to that really, and even then, it would feel incomplete given I had a plan to play the trilogy in whole, DLCs included.

But if anything, I'd like to recount one of my favorite moments, deep into the plot. That moment where Shulk stays the Monado mere moments before he would have slain Egil and gotten the revenge this whole journey was originally building towards. It's a perfect character moment, and I particularly love that it isn't just Shulk plainly laying down his arms.

"I can't kill you, but I can stop your blade. And I'll do it. Over and over again, until… we understand each other."

This, coming off of his questioning why the conflict even originally started is amazing to me. And combined with the visual of him just sitting on the shoulder of the giant that is Egil's Yaldabaoth, it's the near-perfect realization of how much bigger the world has become beyond what now feels like a petty dispute at the end of it all, which makes the subsequent betrayal by Zanza and his co-conspirator all the more compelling when you take a step deeper; it was already out of shulk's hands the moment he stepped into the Mechonis.

But of course, this is one amazing moment in a series known for these. So I look forward to when I eventually return to XC2 and so-on.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year-Door (Switch Remake)

Intelligent Systems

The original TTYD still stands as one of my favorite games of all time. "Baby's first rpg" sort of deal, sure, but still holding a few key mechanics that I'm still surprised haven't been utilized in other modern rpgs (biggest example being the audience system). The remake is still grand in the way that most remakes/remasters are (which is to say, mostly unnecessary if porting to modern systems was the ideal standard), but still brought some nice surprises that made me fall in love with the game all over again. All of the main areas gaining new renditions of the battle theme, relocalizing the english script to affirm that Vivian is a trans woman (and making her mini-arc directly related to that fact) are both nice new details among other QoL improvements. There's even two *new* superbosses unique to this game that are both welcome additions. It was very nice to return to this old gem, I'll say that much.

The World Ends With You

Square Enix

(Sorry if this sections a bit half-assed, was the last section written for the year)

Yeah there's... quite a few rpg classics in this bunch, but this one was a huge reccomendation by one of my friends. I could wax poetic about how much the game utilizes the Nintendo DS as a console to its fullest extent (including a wireless feature that would be the spiritual predecessor to the 3DS’s Streetpass functionality), but really as a piece of media, it’s probably one of the best at folding a narrative into itself. Early on in the game’s first week, the faux-mentor figure to Neku Sakuraba in Mr. Hanekoma poses him the words of advice that make up this game’s title:

"The world ends with you. If you want to enjoy life, expand your world. You gotta push your horizons out as far as they'll go."

This tenet is so deeply intertwined with both the game and story. I'm gonna skip ahead to the ending for this, Neku ends up inadvertently saving the city because he's gained the ability to trust even in someone who has just proven his betrayal. It's a powerful moment, but it's incredibly powerful that Neku was chosen to be someone meant to rig the game against this outcome; from the outset we see him incredibly rude and untrustful of the world around him, and tries to shut out everyone and everything. But through the three weeks we see him, we also get to see him slowly expand his world beyond himself, begin to empathize with his game partners and even strangers. I especially love the way this dynamic is flipped by midway through week 3; Neku fighting through for the sake of everyone else at this point, having to remind Beat that there's more than his life on the line.

This also reflects so well in aspects like shopping and food. The best gear isn't just found in a shop, but properly mingling and bartering with the storeowners reveals new shit bit by bit in a very cool way. Food's a lot more direct, obviously it helps to increase stats but I love that the most effective way to do it is as a team. But I also love that game encourages slowing down in ways beyond what the game is directly. Letting real time pass on a DS frees up space for food, and the pins that Neku uses to fight passively gain strength while the game isn't played. It's a really strong ludonarrative reinforcement: It wants you to spend time outside its world too.

It's a clever and thoughtful game and also influential in ways I don't think it gets proper credit for. Certainly something worth interrogating over and over.

Shin Megami Tensei V: Vegeance

Atlus

There is probably an argument to be made about the potential anti-consumer practice that comes from Atlus doing revised releases of their major titles, thus making fans pay twice for full experiences, as often as they have, but honestly I’m quite glad they revisited SMTV of all things. While I’m not of the opinion that the original was a “glorified demo” and this is the real game, it was certainly evident that its development was less-than stellar in several aspects: nearly nonexistent dungeon design, weak story and characters, and being locked to a weak console with poor optimization. Even the gameplay loop itself, the game’s strongest factor, was being marred by a harsh level-scaling formula in its damage calculations, an issue that has rarely ever been a problem for modern megaten titles. Between it, the more disappointing release of Soul Hackers 2, and the still frequent milking of Persona 5 as a brand, there was a lot of sentiment that the franchise’s best days were behind them.

Vengeance, and Atlus’s other big hits this year (one of which I will touch on later), did a lot to assuage those fears. While it doesn’t try to fix the original story, now dubbed the “Canon of Creation”, the new “Canon of Vegenace” gives us a lot more focused plot and characters, and even the structure itself does the Creation Canon a boon by informing on their more distant personalities in that story. Yoko Hiromine is the closest thing to a dueteragonist this tale has, and her combination of pessimism, lack of faith in others, and vindictiveness bounces very strongly on the rest of the human cast, especially when it frames her as a foil to the Creation Canon’s most intriguing character in Tao Isonokami. Even once she does her grand betrayal and leaves the party before the game’s final arc, she never feels truly “absent” from them, and it still left me rather interested to see her goal in all this. The more focused plot also benefits the new antagonistic faction in the Qadištu. I love how cool and calculated they are as a group, and in true megaten fashion, I like that their motivations speak more to the world’s larger structure, and why the Mandala System that Lucifer struggles to break exists in the first place. I would be remiss not to also mention the reintroduction of demon conversations in the new demon haunts, in which there are a lot more lore and story tidbits to chew on, especially with our protag’s ever constant companion in the proto-fiend Aogami. Hearing him mull on the story developments, and his growing concern for the Nahobino endears me to him quite a lot, and his loss in the party kicking off the final arc hits with the weight it needs.

In terms of gameplay, while dungeon design is still nothing too special, navigating the world feels a lot better to do with the introduction of the magatsuhi rails, which serve as useful shortcuts or expansions into less traversed areas from the original release. I didn't care much for the original's traversal, but romping around the ruins of japan in this run feels a lot more fun. But that's a bucket in the water compared to how much the combat loop was improved from the first game. I've already mention the og SMTV's issue with level scaling, and it's removal from the calcs is already a fine improvement, but the first real big win was the addition of demon traits (a carryover from a mechanic first toyed around in Persona 5 Royal). It's a continuation of the efforts first started in SMTIVA to make demons have more definitive identities, but the traits in this game really do take it to another level. Of the megatens with fusion that I've played up to now, Vegeance actually made me want to pay attention to the deeper mechanics in demon fusing, because now it felt like I was playing to make demons synergize with each other and the Nahobino rather than purely making a team that counters the next major boss. Some of the traits also make good use of the base system mechanics of press turn; Vengeful Might is one of the best passive power boosts in the game, tied to a few select demons, but makes you play a rather vulnerable team since that boost is tied to the number of exposed weaknesses on the team. It's a rather clever reversal on what the game implicitly teaches you, and I love the risk and reward built into that sort of design. I also love that Atlus is willing to play more into the volatility of the press turns themselves. Several passives and Innates grant more icons when triggered, but I think the coolest adjustment is in another new addition of the virtual trainer, the tech that lets you rematch bosses with the twist that they now gain an extra turn and may sometimes gain the ability to piece resistances if an attack is nullified. It's a simplistic addition, but I love that it leads to deeper strategization without resorting to the megido rage spam of games past.

Oh and the music. Ryota Kozuka was already proven to be an amazing musician after the banger that was Battle B2 in SMTIV a decade ago, but he continues to push the bar with his contributions to Vegeance's OST. Like I'd be hard pressed to name a game with this much level of variety in its boss themes for the dozens of bosses between both canons, and every track is a banger. The head bopping Battle -bounce and roll-, to the goes-hardism of Battle -The Adversary-. Not a day has gone by since the drop of soundtrack that I don't have the urge to jam to it.

Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers

Kart Krew Dev

If TWEWY and XC1 were the result of my friends heavy recommendations, this one was going against the grain of my friends' complaints about this title. I never touched its predecessor, SRB2Kart, but my impression from the videos I watched of it were that it was a rather creative and impressive Mariokart-like, using Sonic and Sega as the baseline for it. Apparently the version 2.0 sequel, Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers, was a lot more divisive, with a complete overhaul to many of the game's systems mechanics, and layering a lot more complex tech into the game's code and identity. This had turned off many casual fans, and when I decided to give the game a go, early on I could understand those complaints. The game's deceptively hard, no doubt about that; you think you're doing nothing wrong, and yet you end up in the back of the pack for most of your online sessions. I even got my another of my friends in Eve to join me along for playing this game and a lot of our sessions would just be struggles. I was ready to just write it off plainly as a fangame of wild disparity in its quality.

But then one night I had joked, after reading how fighting games inspired a lot of the design choices in this game, that losing in the game gives the same defeatist feeling of going 0-2 in locals. And in saying that, something just clicked for me. I stopped just throwing myself at the game, and instead did some studying up. I watched how other people tackled the game. I watched other people's time trials and even ran a few of my own in this game's alternative trial mode, SPB Attack (which is overall a lot slower and you're chased by this game's take on the Blue Shell in the Super-Propelled Bomb). It became less about playing the game, and more about grinding it, and what do I have to show for it? Well... I'm not winning races outright, but I'm also no longer struggling to climb out of the lower half of the pack, and I'm having so much fun just being in the scrap.

Setting aside gameplay, this is a really outstanding fangame. There are so many loving recreations of Sega's history in the game's ~150 tracks and ~60 battle stages (even when they're complete dogshit to play in like Carnival Night, lmao). Even the courses that are from titles well after the Sonic series’ jump to 3D look and feel like effective backports (see: Savannah Citadel). Other aspects of the art design, the clean as hell pixel art for the various kart racers and items, the repurposing of old favorite SFX from the classic era of sonic, as well as how visceral the kart explosion is in all its glory; It's the sort of game I daydream about returning to when I'm bored at work.

I won't recommend this to you if balk at the idea of "grinding" a multiplayer game. It's certainly not the sort of party play experience that modern mariokart is. But if you can enjoy a good ass-kicking and a race that makes you actively think about every state of the game, Ring Racers is fuckin' perfect.

Class of ‘09, Class of ‘09: The Re-Up

SBN3

Now, while I will touch on what I got out of these two VNs, I also want to mention why I never went on to do the series’s third installment in C09: The Flipside despite its release this year, and to juxtapose it with a phenomenon F.D. Signifier noted in his great video about edgelord-centric media. Me and a few friends were rather grabbed by the leading lady, Nicole, and the several plights she finds herself in. Beset by classmates and teachers alike who all want to use and abuse her for sex, her own poor mental well-being and coping mechanisms, and living in a political climate so deep into the wars on terror and drugs, her vicious reversals on her school life revealed some rather surprising relatability for Nicole's plight, and some interesting introspections to our own pasts in high school. Sure, a large chunk of this game's dark humor does still rely heavily on punching down on racial minorities, and the creator posturing C09 as an “Anti-Visual Novel” was always gonna be an eyeroll for me, but at its core I really thought for a time that Class of ‘09 was a well made period piece about the underbelly of urban-suburban schooling that could sometimes be serious about the interiority denied to girls living through that, and those moments were good enough to let me look past SBN3’s dodgy politics and the more egregious shit.

Come around the Flipside’s release, and I learn through word of mouth that it is terrible. SBN3 makes a huge point within one of the ending messages to disparage the series’ budding popularity with newer fans giving the minimal amount of critical pushback. Another of the endings makes the anti-arab sentiments espoused by the characters explicitly about Palestine, which feels equal parts gross given the year-long genocide the country now faces and rather out-of-place given the previous two game’s focus on a more nebulous “The Taliban” brand of xenophobia. Which brings me to why I mentioned FD’s video; he makes the point that trying to course-correct a piece of media’s audience by making the politics more direct is more likely to do more harm to the work’s overall quality than keeping said politics ambiguous. His examples were all media trying to push a progressive message, but I think the Flipside is a perfect example of this phenomenon in a conservative vector. Even beyond the political scope, there’s a lot of signs showing that SBN3 was phoning it in: smallest number of endings in the series with very few dialogue prompts, all major routes repeating an already used prostitution plot thread. Really the whole crash-out killed a lot of the motivation I had interrogating this series, and I can't in good faith recommend spending any time on a story that's gonna childishly call you a pedophile for enjoying it.

Peglin

Red Nexus Games

“What if Roguelike Peggle?” is an incredible sell of a game. This is another instance of something whose existence I learned of through Aliensrock, and I think on paper it’s another neat subversion on the deckbuilder subgenre. Rather than some deck you're given a set of orbs you shoot down a board, and every peg you hit contributes to the damage dealt. It's a simple loop, and oftentimes a lot more engaging to play through than your Griftlands or other standard deckbuilder.

That being said, the game's hampered greatly by its take on the difficulty climb. The Cruciball levels aren't much different from something like Slay the Spire's Ascensions (bulkier stronger enemies & less access to heals, etc.) but because it's hard to get a good read on an orb's trajectory beyond maybe the third peg bounce, and because the Cruciball penalties are insistent on both weakening the base power level and access to the special pegs in criticals, refreshes, and bombs, runs feel wildly inconsistent because enemies don't get cleared fast enough (or at least, that's how I felt using my favorite class in the Spinventor). There's even possibility that one of the first floor bat enemies just regularly outheals the damage you deal because the singular refresh peg is barely out of discernible reach.

Generally, the base game and concept are cool and fun, but I think its still rather rough around the edges in terms of difficulty balance.

Hopeless Junction

NadiaNova

(Content Warning: This is porn VN 2 of 2 and this one contains scenes of dubious consent involving alcohol, a little unsanitary kink, and while not definitively incestuous, some scenes lean into the idea.)

In some of the NSFW circles I lurk in on Tumblr (iykyk), I was made privy to Nadia’s body of visual novel works through fanart of this title. I was curious (and horny) enough one day in the late summer/early fall to give it a proper look over. I think it's fairly effective on the smut it sells, watching our main girl Kalinda pushed well into humiliation by her "love" interest Zarina, up to a surprisingly hilarious moment where drunken sex gets entirely wrecked by Kalinda barfing out the cheap beer she was goaded into drinking. But take it a step above and I think this story paints some rather sweet pictures about sapphic sisterhood. I won't spoil the why, but beyond Zarina's abrasiveness is a woman ready to give up on life, and despite Kalinda never really being able to be her match to that abrasive personality, it's quite sweet seeing her keep making that effort in this short tale. There's also a fauxcestual side-plot between Kalinda and her "little sister" Chandra, where Zarina's antics force the pair to reevaluate the status of their relationship, and while I don't have larger thoughts on the -cest part of this dynamic, I did enjoy the deeper conversation being had here, especially given the fact that it is two trans women giving retrospection to their sense of sisterhood.

Nice work all-in-all. I'm looking forward to reading Nadia's other previous works, especially given how much work I've heard go into her most recent venture in Malcatras' Maiden.

Marfusha: Sentinel Girls

Hinyari9

Pretty simplistic rouge-y shmup that a friend really wanted me to play. It’s a pretty small game and there’s not a whole lot for me to sink my teeth into, but I think it’s core loop is quite easy to settle into a rhythm with. (Heck, the day before this post is supposed to go live I ended up doing 5 or so runs back-to-back with no issue.) There’s also some neat tension between the story and gameplay; in order to learn about Marfusha’s relationships with the other girls in her squad, you’ll likely have to play to cover the weakness in her partner’s weapon type, but that gets compounded by the fact that Marfusha’s guns don’t last forever and that you’ll likely have to cycle towards other weapons throughout the many waves you’re expected to outlast. Again, simplistic stuff, but not bad by any means and it’s all-around a fun game to just play. And the artwork does a good job of selling the military state aesthetic.

Metaphor: ReFantazio

Atlus

Incredible game for me to close the year out with, and an incredible release for Atlus to close their bonkers year of fantastic rpgs with, both celebrating everything that came before it while also aiming to sprout new ideas into the fold. I think the easiest thing for me to point out from the get-go is the battle and game systems, those being a melting pot of modern megaten’s press turn systems, combined with Persona 3’s take on the phys/mag split, with a little touch of Etrian Odyssey’s usage of frontline/backline and aggro mechanics. Even the Archetypes function a lot more akin to Digital Devil Saga 2’s mantra grid, albeit trading in pure skill trees for more of an EO-esque job system. It’s a fun system to play around with, even if it’s incredibly prone to getting broken open once you’re in the late-game (let’s just say you can stack a lot of damage boosts together really easily to one-shot bosses). Even older megaten gets a little love with both direct callbacks to the devil summoner titles, and several of the skillnames being reverted to their Megami Tensei iterations. I was just excited to have a press turn game with proper party members again, but the way the other mechanics with Archetypes ebb and flow give it an even more unique edge than the "Digital Devil Saga 3" I was memeing it out to be pre-release.

Visually speaking, the game is equally stunning. The painted skies, the handrawn UI portraits, the particle effects (especially with the weapons, oh my god). It really does make you feel like you’re walking through a fantasy novel at times. Obviously an artstyle as strong as this game ‘s shouldn’t be too surprising given this is something the P-Studio team is well known for at this point, but is still worth stating (god I need more artbooks and design works books).

I think if there was one thing everyone was concerned about prior to release, it was the way the game would handle its writing. One of Katsura Hashino’s biggest directorial weakness as seen in his previous ventures with both Persona and Catherine was his handling of minorities and women. (Persona 3’s oddly transphobic beach scene, Persona 4… just in general, to name some examples.) Given the early information that this story would deal with issues surrounding race gave a lot of people pause, myself included, and the early stretches of the game’s prologue hadn’t done much to persuade me either way (really only made it more evident that whatever would happen would likely be heavy-handed). But I stuck around, and was pleasantly surprised by this game's political musings. It takes time to properly cultivate Euchronia's history and how a populist figure like Louis Guiabern rose to the prominence he did. I eyerolled a little bit that the fantasy races fell in the usual fantasy pitfall of definitive physical differences, but this is really only a footnote and many aspects of the racism depicted in Metaphor highlight how much the divides are struggles of class. My jaw dropped when I learned that a race war was really a coverup for the church's misdeeds on experimenting on the underclass. Speaking of the Sanctist Church, the other major faction in this game, I love that their motivations for evil aren't out of some love for a problem dragon (ily Fire Emblem but lol), but rather the calculated moves of an institution trying to cling to ever corrupting power. There is no grand conspiracy, just a power struggle. The supporting cast is also amazing: Brigitta is a banger of a class-traitor throughout her entire arc, and while I have some complicated thoughts about her framing of the matter, I did enjoy Catherina's arc culminating in her trying to educate her people instead of clinging to leftist vagueries. I won't say all of the game's writing is perfect by all means (despite its best efforts to the contrary, it does dangerously tow the line of political adventurism at times, and the big late-game twist does give echoes of FE Echoes in ways that nags at me a little), but I do think this was by all accounts a well thought-out and made metaphor on the moments of ever-destabilizing governmental rule.

There's so much more I could talk about here, how much I love the gauntlet runners as a concept, how amazing each of the party members are (Heismay's speech against the boss of his introduction arc is a top character moment of all time, hands down), but if I kept going I would not be able to finish this post before midnight. I'll say this much though: Metaphor deserves its larger consensus as a GOTY contender, and I am very hopeful about this marking Atlus's return to prominence as a developer of RPGs.

In close

What a great year for me, huh. I didn't even get into any of the books I read here either (This is How You Lose the Time War was amazing omg). But I dunno, part of writing this year's lineup made me feel like this was an unsustainable method of talking about games. I had plenty to say in 2023's lineup, wheras here I ran out of time even accounting for games I know I wouldn't have super deep or well written thoughts on. Maybe I should start writing about these things as separate entities, or something like that.

That being said, I do want to strive for even nicher titles. Mice Tea and Hopeless Junction were good starts, but I still don't have the committal to the idea that I want to have, especially as I get more and more frustrated with the current state of mainstream and even upper-echelon indie gaming. (Rahhhh I hate that all the good yuri fanartists talents are wasted on gacha slop rahhhhh)

Also some things I didn't get into were the games and VNs I played made by my friend r0mbuffer. I didn't want to weigh too heavily in on the stuff I had a hand in helping in (even if it was just proofreads and some QA), but you should check their shit out, I swear!

Here's to 2025, the year that Royals of the Tempest will no longer be a copium title!

[sexhaver]

games where you work for an evil exploitative megacorporation that very obviously views you only as easily replaced capital (Hardspace Shipbreaker, Satisfactory, Deep Rock Galactic) kind of paint themselves into a narrative corner. on the one hand, it's tempting to make your employer the villain and set up a story arc where you work your way up the ranks/unionize/etc to win against all odds in a David and Goliath story. and that would be fantastic if this were real life, but it's not real life, it's a video game that you presumably bought because you, the player, enjoy the gameplay loop provided by what your in-game avatar would consider "exploitative and unsafe working conditions". so you either completely overhaul your entire game once the player hits a certain point in the storyline (bad) or end up with an ending that by definition cannot change anything despite supposedly being focused on overthrowing the status quo (less bad but silly) because it turns out people like to replay games after beating them on the same file.

Hardlight Shipbreaker does this the wrong way by shoehorning in a plot about unionization that ends with the union "winning" against the company, except for gameplay reasons none of these victories translate to any change whatsoever in your in-game working conditions (because that would fundamentally change the game that people enjoyed enough to play all the way through the storyline of).

Deep Rock Galactic takes the approach of having the titular company be less "comically evil" and more "comically focused on profits", which meshes super well with the conceit of the game. for example, when loading into a Salvage mission, Mission Control opens with "a previous crew lost their Mini M.U.L.E's, their Drop Pod, and their lives in this cave." the order those things are listed in tells you everything you need to know about DRG's priorities as a company without having to hammer it home with character arcs

Satisfactory takes imo the best approach by making you an active hand of the evilness of your employer instead of just a cog in the machine. you're sent to a beautiful alien planet full of breathtaking views and diverse wildlife, then told to destroy it by extracting every last bit of value out of it to make stuff that you then turn around and fire off into space. and you do! gladly! like. you know how Spec Ops: The Line had that scene with the white phosphorus that was supposed to make you, the player, feel like a monster for gleefully pressing the buttons to make it happen? Satisfactory is like that but for environmentalism because the gameplay loop gradually changes how you view the world from childlike wonder to ruthless efficiency. what was formerly a rolling grassy field is now a site for mining outposts. you don't see a waterfall, you see placements for water pumps to cool your coal plants. alien forests full of plants unknown to science become annoyances to be chainsawed down so you can run conveyor belts back to your megafactory. in this way, Satisfactory is a much better critique of capitalism than Hardspace Shipbreaker not even trying to be

[noellevanious]

games that i think do "alternating gameplay loops" the best

sonic adventure/sa2 (base gameplay and chao-raising)

no more heroes 1 (base gameplay and the Odd Jobs)

granblue rising (the core fighting game and, when you can actually get any, Gran Bruise games)

holocure: save the fans! (core gameplay and the HoloHouse stuff)

fallout new vegas (core rpg gameplay and gambling or playing Caravan)

the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games (they basically sell themselves on this with their wide range of minigames)

deep rock galactic (ONLY multiplayer - the core dive missions and hanging out at the bar with friends after)

[sirisaacnukem]

Deep Rock Galactic Scout

The Scout was the last miniature in the DRG board game to finish, and also my favorite class to play in the video game. Since I thought it had the most interesting pose of all the character models, I did this as my entry in an online painting contest, and did the best I could on it. I think I spent around 15-16 hours total on him. Nothing too insane like NMM or crazy freehands, just a very clean paint job. The model has a bedroll, which I was puzzled by since the dwarves never sleep in the caves (and Hoxxes would be far too dangerous to try.) So I painted it like a yoga mat, which amused me very much. And with the scout, all 58 models in the DRG board game are done!

[alexthegreat2077]

This is literally me sometimes

Hey there

I decided to make a formal introduction

Alex

22 (Birthday May 7th)

Yeah I’m a Taurus

Favorite things to do

-Music (all sort of stuff from Metallica to 311)

-All time favorite Games (COD Zombies, Borderlands, Pokémon,Warframe, Deep Rock Galactic)

Yanderes (one day I will find you)

-Movies (iconic ones but slashers is also up there)

-Youtube

-Italian food (Spaghetti)

-I am a bit of a Pokemon card collector (have Tornadus V Alt art and shiny Eevee from hidden fates

- I currently have 5 dogs

-Currently in school for radiology (probably be a diagnostic one)

Dislikes

-Being alone :(

-My sister dead from brain cancer

-When it gets 100 degrees Fahrenheit

- Make the crazy drivers stop please

Currently doing

-school assignments that are melting my brain

-Just been taken by the best person I have ever met!

- occasionally play on the switch or steam

(Ps5 has a broken HDMI port)

-Mostly Recovered from a car accident that happened on February 4th (occasional pain when driving the car nowhere else)

-Lurking/observing here or discord

Thank you for getting to bottom of the post and you have a great day/night!

[rocjaws-curated-collection]

Gog the Half Ogre from Tales from the Red Dragon Inn. I think he came out best of any of the minis so far! I'll come back to the last two eventually, but the Deep Rock Galactic game will arrive soon and keep me quite busy.

[cutest-silly-nb]

RROOOOOXXXX

HAVE YOU PLAYED DEEP ROCK GALACTIC IF YOU HAVENT YOU NEED TO LIKE RIGHT NOW ITS ACTIALLY SO SO FUCKING GOOD ALSO ITS ON SALE RN TIL THURSDAYSO GET IT!! RJEHFKANDKAKS

right. Deep Rock Galactic is a excellent game in which you go into caves on an alien planet to mine stuff and kill bugs. And once youve mined with your dwarven friends you go back to your space rig and you're rich! And you have beer with your friends :)

It's actually so fucking brilliant like definitely one of the best FPS games I've played ever <- bought it like a few days ago

Anyway literally anyone who has played an FPS game will love this I bet and youd fucking LOVE it I double bet and I triple bet we'd have so much fun if we played it together.

Uh.

Rox and Stone!!

Rocks and stone? Above water flowing underground? Letting the days go by? Let the water hold me down?

anyway i feel like i've heard of it but whatever i'll get it!!! if my dad says yes. also i love you and i love video games yay woohoo

[splashink-games]

A Note On... Dwarven Space Miners

Deep Rock Galactic is a co-op, first-person shooting (FPS) game by Ghost Ship Games.

Now I don't normally play FPS games. I'm terrible at them. But for my friends, sure, okay. I'll play. And that's why I've played this.

This game has two main parts to it: mining and fending off endless waves of spiders. Each mission has a set goal and through the level, you mine minerals to bring back to base or call down supplies or as a goal itself. The domestic creatures don't take kindly and they attack you with intermittent waves of mostly grunts but with enough variety to keep players on their toes. Simple, yes. Execution is a little wonky sometimes.

The best feature of this whole experience is the uniqueness of each class and their importance. Because unlike many, many games whose classes may have specific upsides, these classes are very balanced in terms of usability. The scout has a grapple that allows quick traversal around the map. The engineer has platforms to reach places. The gunner has a zip line. And the driller has a freeze gun and a flamethrower. Also drills. With the multitude of movement abilities, it's super interesting to delegate certain tasks to certain classes. As a scout, I'm often mining the hard-to-reach minerals while my team is actually scouting the area, ironically.

Ultimately, Deep Rock Galactic is super enjoyable with pals, especially for the first 20-40 hours!

As always,

Enjoy Gaming! Rock and Stone!

[daakjenaar]

Sci-fi writers not being racist and unimaginative challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

I had a dream that I tried to write this recently and accidentally replaced it with footage of me playing Deep Rock Galactic when I tried to post it, so I’ll try my best to not do that.

I know saying that a lot of fantasy and science fiction worldbuilding is barebones and bland is a pretty tepid take. In many fictional settings, the idea of nationality, ideology, and race are conflated. One and the same, effectively. Mass Effect has the Turian Hierarchy and the Salarian Union, galaxy-spanning governments made up of almost singularly the species turians and salarians respectively, who all believe in roughly the same things, have the same broad personality, and have seemingly been stagnant for thousands of years. Deviation from the turian mentality is treated as a unique trait worthy of ascending a random NPC to a supporting character. To all other races, the idea that humans can believe in different ideologies is fascinating. I think it’s an uncontroversial take to say that this is pretty bland writing, and at least a bit racist. Outside of the special and unique (and overwhelmingly European) humans, all other cultures are monolithic and simplified. 

I should stop myself here because I genuinely have at least half a dozen essays’ worth of Mass Effect topics I would want to go on a rant about. I should move on.

Orson Scott Card’s writing beyond the original Ender’s Game is also emblematic of this approach. In his sci-fi universe, all of the countless worlds that have been colonized are entirely monocultural. Specifically, they are takes on cultures from the point of view of a 30-something center-right mormon in America in the 1980’s. Highlights include a world colonized by the Japanese which bears the name Divine Wind, which translates to ‘Kamikaze’, which might be in slightly poor taste. There is also a world with a predominately Chinese population that is notable for a) being largely covered in rice fields, and b) not knowing what neurodivergency is. It gives overwhelming ‘I read a Wikipedia article and skimmed a really racist history book and am now an expert on all other cultures” vibes. He also wrote Xenocide and Children of the Mind, so maybe we should stop taking him seriously.

So often, worldbuilding in fiction refuses to reckon with the idea that the nations they depict can be anything beyond overwhelmingly monocultural stereotypes of real-world people. After all, it’s much simpler if all of the aliens are just caricatures of other people that really exist, right? No work needed. Oh no, what's this picture of a T'au doing here?

This took me a while to write because I’ve got a lot of takes on the topic of writing and worldbuilding, and it was hard to figure out what to include and what to save for a more focused post later. On that topic, I do have another one planned focusing on my personal, insignificant takes on the ingredients to make a coherent backdrop for a story, and some hot takes and blanket statements to make about worldbuilding as a whole. It’ll hopefully be something more positive and constructive than this.

EDIT MADE MINUTES AFTER I POSTED THIS: I forgot to include the funniest example of all time, the world of Warhammer Fantasy. There are some incredible examples of this kind of worldbuilding. Kislev, the Lizardmen, Cathay, Nippon, Araby, the Tomb Kings, Bretonnia, all comically transparent carbon copies of the most obvious, stereotypical parts of real-world cultures that managed to become a relatively successful media franchise that helped to launch Games Workshop into the company it is now.

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

check in post

check in post

as for this month-or-so I've been sticking my toes into more socializing in internet spaces as I've had positive experiences from doing it in other places and pushing myself a bit more will hopefully help on that front

notably I am starting to realize I was sort've being a stuck up dipshit as an excuse to push people out out of fear so I am starting to kick that back out and to be honest I think the social media drop off helped A Lot with that; tumblr has a bad habit of starting up this idea that because you are a part of x y or z group you are The Best

of course you do need to be ready to push some people away so it's not like it's entirely bad but I think tumblr goes a bit far with hyping that part up

besides that I've been playing xiv again (related to the above point) and am trying to get into it a bit more consistently rather then subbing, burning myself out doing the same things I always do, unsubbing for like three months, then repeating the cycle so that's good

uhhh the helldivers II honeymoon is over because honestly the missions take fucking ages and I don't really have time for it with the sample system they have for progression being painfully slow

it's not warframe but it's not good despite being a very well designed game

this decision had nothing to do with the PSN account thing but honestly if they insist on that I might return it honestly because from what posts I've seen the devs have been fairly pro sony about the entire thing which is rubbing me the wrong way

on the bright side it did indirectly introduce me to helldivers I which plays much faster and is honestly a neat little game so that's nice

funnily enough this all comes right in time for deep rock galactic season 5 so rough for HDII

sekiro progress has been going well and after beating lady butterfly I blew through gyobu and that flaming bull so I am pretty happy about that

giant snake segment tense as hell though

annnd I have that video game feat of strength coming up in a post after that

I hope things have been going well for you internet

[intothecast]

Into the Aether | 269 | The Ill-Fated Teen in Time

I don't understand! Nobody in 1885 cares that Balatro is going to be the best deckbuilding rougelike of 2024!!!! Discussed: Andre 3000, Balatro, Break bits, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, Helldivers 2, streaming plans, fighting at the lake, the year Silksong will come out, Nintendo Switch 2, Mario vs. Donkey Kong is fine, but Nintendo remade the wrong game by Oli Welsh, Sony's future, Xbox's Nothingburger, a cliffhanger.

Listen to the show here 😘

[crazymachinefan]

Splatoon 3 came out shortly after I started my first year of college, and now after two years, it's coming to an end shortly after I start my third. We knew about this before the game even launched, but it still doesn't feel real.

When I played the World Premiere, I knew instantly that I had to get the game. My only Splatoon experience prior was playing 2's singleplayer campaigns and a little multiplayer at a friend's house and a single round of 1 at a different friend's house. Despite my relative lack of experience, I picked it up quickly and it was genuinely some of the most fun I had ever had.

Due to transportation related bottlenecks, I wasn't able to get the game until the day after launch, but once I got it I proceeded to play it every day afterwords for over a year. I kid you not, I didn't miss a single daily catalog bonus or salmon run superbonus for over a year until mid-November '23, and I seldom missed a daily Shel-drone reward (that thing in Alterna where you give it 999 power eggs and you get a thing the next day). The thing that killed this streak was buying Deep Rock Galactic on a whim and playing so much of it I missed a salmon run rotation. Probably for the best, honestly.

I don't think I realized how big of a part of my life the game was until now. The wi-fi at my college is kinda awful, so I did some research and bought a Ethernet adapter for my dock. 7 PM just kinda became Splatoon-o'clock since that's when the day rolls over during the summer here. If I didn't have time then, I would either stay up late or squeeze it in the next day. I fully completed every catalog, several of which I had to grind about 30 levels for in the last week. I have accumulated nearly 700 hours in Splatoon 3 as of the time of writing, which isn't the absurdly high numbers typically associated with high playtime but it is far and away the highest of everything I play that keeps track. The only game I can think could be higher is Minecraft, which I have had for over a decade. I hit every Splatfest, every Big Run, getting gold on a good chunk of the latter and winning exactly two of the former. (Team Frye FTW.) I've got somewhere past 200 snails saved up, since I never really use them ever.

(This is all on one console, for the record, which I got in late 2020 (IIRC) as a birthday gift for myself mainly to play BOTW again. This is also all on the Joy-cons that came with it; somehow remaining drift-free even after possibly a thousand hours of total use.)

The Grand Festival was the best send-off it could have possibly been. So much music, so much to see, some of the best Splatoon there has ever been. I took a ton of photos; I'll have to sort through them at some point. I also took photos of every splatfest in Inkopolis, my only regret there is that I didn't also take them in Splatsville.

o7 Splatoon 3. I don't know what changed, but I will never be the same as I was before.

[eziojensenthe3rd]

Midnight Gaming: 3rd Rock from the Galactic (or how I learned to stop worrying and love group-orientated alcoholism)

So I last night I played Deep Rock Galactic past midnight, looked at socials later and found....

Y'know what, this is kinda topical but the Game Awards is coming up real soon and I've heard some grumblings on some places over it and I gonna say it... do people actually treat the Game Awards with some level of respect and prestige? Because I honestly considered it as nothing more than the game industry's official event fot self-congratulatory arrogance. A masturbatory ceremony where they give out awards to developers and actors and feel good about themselves despite all the mass layoffs, consumer-unfriendly practices and horseshit?

Honestly, the only reason I'm even interested in the game awards is for the game announcements and reveals that show up in the event. If the awards didnt have any of that, if it was played entirely straight like the baftas? I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't even care about the game awards. What is there to get up in arms? That they arent jacking it the same way they used to? That your game didnt win the title of "Game of the Year"? Listen, plenty of games get a bundled version released called a Game of the Year edition regardless of whether they actually won that award. Its the same way that a restaurant says their pizza is the best pizza in the world or a coffee shop claims to have the best cup of coffee. Its just a form of marketing. And thats ultimately in my opinion what the Game Awards is at the end of the day: Marketing.

Of course, having your game shown on an event like that is a good way to get attention onto your project and Geoff knows that too, thats why its so goddamn expensive to have your game shown at all. Its for that reason that some folks have decided to start their own event for folks who dont wanna shell out a fortune just to get some eyeballs on their game.

The Game Awards for Games who can't afford the Game Awards is an event headed up by several people as a parody of the Game Awards but also serving as a means for smaller indie devs to present their games, kinda like steam nextfest or alphabetagamers "games to get excited about" fest. This isnt really a news thing but i'm happy to talk about this if it gets maybe a couple of people to learn about this.

So Deep Rock Galactic is a game I enjoy quite a lot. Its your everyday 4-player coop shooter but taking place in destructible cave enviroments with hordes of bugs to squash. And you play as Dwarves.

DRG's main gameplay loop starts with picking one of several missions that are available in several biomes and dropping down onto Hoxxes. Once there you complete your objectives while collecting any materials and gold you find as well as fighting off the local threats, then call for a ride home and get on before it leaves again.

The classes you play have their strengths and unique gear to bring to the team with the Scout having a grappling hook for traversal and a flare launcher to help light caves up. Engineers have their required-by-law turret item to place in various areas to routinely shoot enemies as well as a platform gun which shoots platforms, naturally. Gunner is your go-to for rapid heavy firepower along with a placeable bubble shield and a zipline launcher. And Driller, my beloved, is the dwarf who treats the earth of hoxxes as his canvas, cutting through the soil with his power drills and blasting chunks with his c4. The four classes play well with their weapons, each having 3 primary and 3 secondaries, being punchy and effective.

DRG works well as an enjoyable coop shooter for a couple of reason, one because of the focus on creating enough of a variety in the gameplay to ensure you dont start to feel bored. Different missions from simple mining jobs, protecting a large drilldozer, scouting out morkite wells and pipes to extract them and hunting giant bugs. These missions also take place across several unique biomes from salt caves, swamp dens, sandy delves, radioactive wastes and arctic caverns to name a few. Procedural generation is used to create every mission area you get dropped into with the enviroments being destructible with either weapon shots, explosions or even using your pickaxe to break the enviroment, giving you and your team an option to do some light terraforming around important areas to better suit your needs.

Now since its a coop game, cooperating with your fellow dwarf coworkers is a necessity to complete your objective and thankfully the game is able to cultivate that naturally with a pointer item to allow for pinging of essential items or priority threats, a single emote that ends up conveying several messages depending on the context such as a welcoming salute, a battlecry or a celebration, as well an overall welcoming vibe in how the dwarfs respond to each other. After most missions, I end up joining my fellow players at the abyss bar, downing several mugs of beer and dancing our hearts out until we collapse, before we all type "gg" and leave the lobby. And if working with others aint your thing (or you dont have an active internet connection) then you can go on missions with a robot helper buddy who you can direct with your pointer to carve out material, fight off enemies and can even revive you a limited number of times.

Ghost Ship Games has done a grand job on their game and have done well by the community, to the point where they are able to publish some indie titles by themselves, helping other devs thanks to how well DRG has done, with it becoming a franchise now with a survivor-like game and a board game along with the upcoming Rogue Core game. If you havent picked it up yet, please do, its a fantastic game with a lot to offer, more than most triple A games do these days.

On that note, what was the last AAA game you payed full price for and not just picked up when it was on sale? The last game I can recall is Cyberpunk 2077 and that was only because I wanted something to test my new computer on.

Y'know Ghost Ship announced recently a selection of real mugs based on the same mugs from the ingame abyss bar. I would love to get those mugs, they look real damn good.

Thats all for tonight. Thank you for reading this post on Midnight Gaming. Feel free to leave feedback and game suggestions. See you all another time. Rock and Stone!