Yeah that one really felt like a perfect match!

As you can see in the amount of games and genres I hovered up last year(s), I am interested in a lot of stuff.

Mostly interesting, meaningful games which are not too long and have a good narrative or emotional impact. I also love a good puzzle game, as there the emotional impact comes from solving the puzzle and appreciating the design. But also big blockbuster experiences if they are well designed and have a captivating narrative. My favorite games I played this year are:

• The Last of Us Part I
• Monument Valley
• God of War Ragnarok
• The Case of the Golden Idol (waiting for a price dip on the sequel)
• Thank Goodness You’re Here!
• If Found…
• Outlast
• Platonic
• Cocoon
• The Walking Dead: The Final Season

I’ve done a few, but must sleep now, I’ll continue tomorrow morning :)!

How old is your daughter?

Most certainly! I’ve been playing this game for ages so I 'm unsure what advice is beginner friendly and what not, but let’s see…

1. Indeed, use any opportunity to throw away one of your starting Strikes (and to a lesser extent, the Defends). Strikes are by far the worst non-curse cards, dealing only 6 damage for 1 cost and taking up a slot in your five card draw each turn. You’ll obtain way better cards and want to increase the chance of drawing those, which is why you really want to remove bad cards as frequently as possible. (At shops and events).
2. Do not avoid elites! These are the special looking enemies on the map and they are the only fights who drop Relics. Having good Relics and building your deck around them is essential to winning this game!
3. Don’t pick a card at the end of every fight, only pick the cards that you really want. A small but predictable deck is way better than a massive deck full of OK cards. Seriously, this is one of the most important things I learned, the skip button is there to be used.
4. Pick cards and relics that increase card draw. A big issue in Slay the Spire is drawing a bad hand and not having the necessary cards for that turn in hand. Lots of cards, relics and potions will allow you to draw extra cards during your turn, which can often make the difference between life and death in this game. Especially towards the end when you have more energy, it becomes extremely important to be able to spend it on good cards, and increasing the cards you draw per turn gives you more options to play good cards.
5. Finally, keep trying. Different enemy types attack in their own pattern every time. Even when you lose, you start to learn their mechanics and how to best counteract those. There are three elite types per act, and three end boss types per act. For the end bosses, you can actually see on the map which one you will have at the end of the current act! So in total, there are “only” 9 different bosses* and 9 different elites. Once you get to know them, you’ll realize their strengths and weaknesses!

There is a tenth secret boss at the true ending, but let’s not dwell on that for now :). Suffice it to say that the pro players have win streaks of 20+ on the highest ascension difficulty (ascension 20) while always taking on this extra final boss. So this game is insanely tactical and almost any run can be salvaged to win even on the highest difficulty!

Enjoy your journey :). Oh, and start with Ironclad, he’s the most straightforward character!

Did you ever give Slay the Spire a go? I was also quite sceptical about roguelikes, but now it is by far my most played game ever at a whopping 600 hours.

The beauty of it is that it is quite easy to understand, but with an incredible amount of depth to it. You’ll start out having trouble winning your first ever run, but that’s when the fun begins. There are 4 characters, each with their play style and cards, and there are 20 ascensions to unlock, each being a more difficult version of a standard run. In the end, you’ll gain such a deep understanding of the balancing and tradeoffs at play that you can’t not be amazed at this achievement in game design. Baalorlord is a great YouTuber and Twitch streamer who is also one of the best players in the world. He was able to do a consecutive winstreak of 20 wins on the highest ascension, showing that this game is RNG based but has a tremendous amount of skill involved too.

There is a difference between telling and putting videos on the internet of you masturbating.

Any portable console is amazing for this, as you can literally change the whole context on a whim. A steam deck is nice, but even a used older console like a PSP / Vita or 3DS is amazing for a reasonable amount of money. As most of these systems no longer have legal ways to buy new games, I see no harm in pirating the games. I am doing this with a 3DS right now and going through the systems hit games is just an amazing ride. Currently enjoying Super Mario 3D Land and Bravely Default.

Aged like the best of wines! 🤌

I think 4 runs decently now though? I have it installed on Steam Deck and that seems to handle 60fps well. I have only played around an hour of it, as I didn’t feel in the mood for that type of game then.

I 100% see that it is satire and respect almost all of its narrative choices, even the torture scene. But that doesn’t mean that it is fun to play. It just felt really draining to have to inhabit these characters for dozens of hours, rather than watching a film about them. Something about playing a game forces you to empathize more closely with “your” character, and it is so draining for me when that character is a dick.

I think it gets 10s because of the attention to detail and vast amount of stuff in it, but I agree that underneath all the polish and glamour it is just an average game with some very dated mechanics.

Weirdly enough, it is the story that makes it worthwhile, even though it was not relaxing to me it did have some amazing moments of both satire and just hilarious situations. I also really enjoyed Franklin as a character and the contrast with Michael (who you could argue is actually a worse person than Franklin).

I am playing sleeping dogs right now and really enjoying it! Runs very well on Steam Deck too.

The driving left on the road is proving to be a tougher hurdle than expected though, I find myself crashing into opposing drivers more frequently than desired :).

I came very late to this series. I only played GTA V last year and I have yet to start another one. While I felt it was an impressive experience and had some great moments, I was also quite baffled at some of the design choices: the game often felt quite clunky and seemed to ignore logical steps in game design that other developers have made (constantly tapping a button to sprint, some of the ways the menus behave).

This is going to sound a bit silly, but I also genuinely had issues constantly doing these reprehensible things in missions. The game is very cynical and constantly makes you do selfish acts for the protagonists. While it is at times extremely funny and is on par with some of the best crime comedies out there, doing this stuff for hours on end was really exhausting for me. I play games to relax and started to feel that this game wasn’t giving me that. Compare this to Red Dead Redemption, a game I absolutely adored, where the protagonist is also morally questionable but at least tries to do the right thing within their frame of reference. I have no problem with morally gray protagonists, but something about the dial being turned up to 11 in GTA V really hit me the wrong way.

Right now I am playing Sleeping Dogs on my Steam Deck. It is clearly a GTA clone, but has an interesting twist in setting: Hong Kong is a really cool environment and the combat focusing more on melee and martial arts is also a fun change of pace. The story is quite simple and again you have to look past some ethical implications, but at least the game has some genuine characters and the events and relationships within the organized crime world are exciting to watch. In almost all respects it is clearly a lesser GTA, but I am having fun with it for the time being.

As you’ve played it for so many hours, what is it that hooks you about this game? I’ve never played it, but I heard it’s sort of a very deep / simulated survival game similar to dwarf fortress? Just love it when you can be so passionate about something that you can lose yourself in it for thousands of hours and keep coming back for more!

I have this with only 1 game (though I’m around the 1000h mark myself): Slay the Spire!

Is Outer Wilds indie? Because Outer Wilds is my favorite :).

I really like Donkey Kong Country as a kid. Great environments, fun platforming and a timeless soundtrack.

On GBA my most played game became an underated licensed gem: Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. The GBA version is completely separate from the ones on other platforms, but it’s a great turn based strategy game in which you get to command the heroes and other units through all important battles of the original story. Really fun!

I recently did the opposite, I sold my Emerald and Blue for a decent price, which helped fund my second hand new 3DS. I don’t really care for the cartridges as long as I can play the games, and I feel no guilt for playing roms for games that are no longer being produced :).

I do like seeing large collections of other people, but I don’t have the same satisfaction from that compared to what it would cost. (I say quite hypocritically, as I have a larger than rational LEGO collection including tonnes of Bionicle sets that I will never let go for any price)

There is still a thick layer of dust on my Valbrace copy, nice to know that another gem is waiting for me!

I remember hearing about wizardry from another enthusiastic fan, but don’t remember what it was about. Some sort of old school RPG?

I have been a bit cheeky, as I have chosen my first Pokémon game as the thumbnail for this post: Pokémon Blue for the Game Boy.

Sadly, I was very young and English was not my mother tongue, so I had no idea how it worked. Skip to several years later, and I gave it another go (this time with some extremely rudimentary knowledge of English, but more importantly with some more experience in games in general). Playing Pokémon this way was a mix of an RPG and a translation based puzzle game, but I was absolutely hooked. Even though I never got past about halfway through the game before my attention faded, I must have done that first half about 10 times in those years.

Later I got Pokémon Emerald for the GBA after my previous GBA game was finished in only a few hours: I figured a Pokémon game would give me my money’s worth. Again, I played this numerous times and had a lot of fun, but never reached the ending.

A few years ago I was feeling nostalgic, and bought a second hand copy of Pokémon: Let’s Go Pikachu, knowing that it was a remake of my first Pokémon game of years ago. Reviews of this version are mixed because of the Pokémon Go like catching mini game, but nostalgia goggles made this an amazing experience for me. I especially remember one whole day where I was at home with a fever, laying on my couch and playing Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu while dipping in and out of the strangest Pokémon related dreams. Even with that bumpy ride, I was eventually able to reach the end of the story and beat the elite four! I know that there is stuff to do after that, but I was happy and sold my copy again.

I have recently bought a second hand New Nintendo 3DS and have been procuring a lot of games on it in a seafaring fashion. One of those that I’m giving a go is Yo-Kai Watch. I’m only a few hours in, and right now it looks absolutely gorgeous, but I’m unsure of the combat design and the actual design of the monsters. If any of you have some other 3DS tips, please let me now, I have a seemingly unlimited budget for 3DS games right now :).