I started Indika the other day. I’m only about a half hour in, but even the opening seconds of the game are setting some wild expectations that make this game wholly unpredictable.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. It’s one of the best metroidvanias I’ve ever played so far. Giving the player the agency to take screenshots of different roadblocks is a very clever solution for the genre, and this game clearly learned from its contemporaries like Hollow Knight and Metroid Dread. One thing that really bummed me out about Hollow Knight was how much it wasted your time and introduced tedium, like how all of the fast travel was far away from points of interest that you visit frequently, like shops, so you’d have to fight through the same enemies over and over. There’s none of that here, but as a metroidvania, this game is perhaps a bit too big. There may often be a lot of traversal and time between upgrades, where it may have been better if you got upgrades more frequently. It can also take the wind out of your sails when you find a new item and it ends up just being a useless lore collectable.

I’m hoping to finish my second playthrough of Wolfenstein: The New Order in the next couple of days. I played it about 10 years ago and loved it, but this time around, I’m playing it on the couch with a controller instead of at a desk with a mouse and keyboard. I think it’s quite clear that they designed this game for the mouse and keyboard experience to the detriment of the controller experience. Enemies can move faster than you can turn to aim at them, the auto aim isn’t very generous, and you have to look at armor and ammo pickups in order to collect them, which can be quite difficult to do mid-firefight on a controller and very easy to do on a mouse and keyboard. I ran into some hand and wrist issues in the past couple of years, and I can get by most of them with an ergonomic mouse, but a controller is still more comfortable, and unfortunately, this game doesn’t play well with a Steam controller (it can’t send simultaneous controller inputs and mouse aim). I’ve never played The New Colossus, but when I move on to it, I will probably power through the discomfort and play with keyboard and mouse if the Steam controller has the same issues again.

I started Fallout London and I’ve only played enough to start aiding the Vagabonds fending off another faction call Isle of Dogs at some bar called the Swan and Miter I think? The game seems more deadly than Vanilla Fallout 4 but that might just be because I haven’t found a Doctor yet after my recent debilitating train crash.

I’m enjoying the game but it was a bitch to get running in a playable state. Buffout 4, and HighFPS Fix with some .ini tweaks are both mandatory mods IMO. I was going crazy at first with, no shit, 5 minute load screens. Now they are down to less than a minute which is still an eternity in the year of our Lord 2024, but I’m too lazy to reinstall on my small SSD to get it even faster, so I’ll just deal.

Kitsune Tails - Cute little platformer, but maybe a little too on the nose in just how much it copies from SMB3. I think they didn’t need to put Kuribo’s Shoe in there.

Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers - Liked the demo a lot, but my opinions keep going back and forth on the full version. At first it felt like there just isn’t enough player agency to consistently get out of the early game or deal with everything the endgame throws at you, but then I started to work out the winning strat by just repeatedly forcing the opponent to bust. Doing that all the time is a little linear though, and the gap between broken cards and worthless cards is a lot.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Did alright in this week’s bracket. Hyde still terrifies me.

Splatoon 3 - lol, lmao

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - the usual