The rules, seemingly a carbon copy of the ones from Reddit, state to “use primary sources,” but I think there is a tendency for this to cause undue emphasis to be placed on “authoritative articles” from big online magazines for the sake of posting news. Those links usually have grandiose/clickbaity titles and are often thinly-veiled advertisements or PR hype campaigns in advance of a game’s release (not on the part of the poster, but on the part of the web magazine).

It seems like the posts with the most engagement on a pure post count number tend to be actual questions or comments from users, such as someone waxing about a game they really like, or some kind of meta conversation.

Obviously you want to disincentivize low-effort posts like “My keyboard broke–how do I fix it?” but some middle ground would be good here, so that enthusiasts can actually discuss the nitty-gritty of games with each other, rather than the magazine turning into a silent news aggregator.

Implementation was rather bad on Linux despite reports and warnings of extreme breakage during the beta, and the legacy client was the only escape hatch for many after they bricked it following force pushing the beta into the mainline client, with no rollback option. If you follow Valve’s bugzilla tracker, you will see hundreds of bug tickets over the last month relating to this UI, which didn’t account for regressions around CEF, Gnome, upstream Nvidia drivers, focus-follows-mouse, memory leaks, screen readers for the blind, instability with system dependencies (Steam carries around a basket of old dependencies), and more. Here is but one example: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9805. Steam only targets Ubuntu and seemingly only tests on that platform, and in so doing this causes a myriad of problems. It’s not an aesthetic issue.

Speaking of memory leaks, one of the most egregious issues right now is the client rapidly consuming all VRAM within a matter of minutes when the window is interacted with (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9638), effectively killing the system and making rendering games impossible.

This is bad :(

What are some good games that opt for a grounded approach? I agree that it is few and far between (whether that is good, bad, or indifferent is a topic for another space). A few that come to mind are Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive (takes place in a survival situation) and Dreams in the Witch House, which incorporates shop/money mechanics and other survival management elements.

You wanna know which came ISN’T grounded? Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy. If you are in the mood for some hilariously baffling moon logic, outlandish set design and embarrassing period voice acting and CG, with a plot that makes slightly more sense than The Mystery of The Druids, give it a shot. It’s basically “we have Blade Runner at home.”

Guess how they travel in the cyberpunk future presented in this game: flying cars. But guess how they receive documents when out of the office? Public fax machine booths mounted on walls of train stations. That’s right. FAX MACHINES. The future is now.

The game is not bad per se, it will definitely stay in your mind with its utter weirdness. Grimbeard did a detailed video on it if you are curious.

Big if true

Probably in the best place it’s ever been, massive overhauls both on the official side and on the community mods side

deleted by creator

Don’t play official servers, modded servers (moderated) are where it’s at. Many unique, standalone maps like Namalsk and Deer Isle. There are zillions of servers catering to everything from hardcore survival to basebuilding

Would be cool if JA3 doesn’t stink

Laika

Similar reaction. Game looks aesthetically pleasing, but it feels very hard to innovate within the matrix of a sidescroller, so unless you are a diehard sidescroller player, might not offer something amazing. The game also crashed a lot for me so I didn’t get very far and just gave up on it. There wasn’t a big hook here that would have made me want to persist through crashes.

Jusant

Haven’t played this one, but take a look at Peaks of Yore. Make sure to turn off all of the postprocessing so you get simple polygons.

En Garde

Had CTDs with this one, too. Looks like I didn’t miss much, but the core concept seems entertaining if they flesh it out.

Lies of P

I need to get around to trying this one. I have this habit of putting off bigger demos till the end.

Looks like a blast, will definitely check it out and hope to see you on there

The game is outstanding, guys. Nuff said. Made by four people. It goes to show how out of touch big development studios are when gameplay takes a back seat and they can’t make something with the fun factor.

Fun demo on this one if you like perspective shift type games like Superliminal

It sounds like Bull would be a good character for you to choose

June 29th

No coop yet!

I agree, it’s hard to find games that just throw you in the deep end nowadays without a gentle progression curve and meta upgrades. Incidentally, check out the Odinfall demo on Steam (if it doesn’t crash on you, devs patched it and introduced a CTD regression). It’s a tough as nails spiritual successor to Nuclear Throne that actually feels like it was cast in the same mold.

Check out the game A Musical Story. It’s ostensibly a rhythm game, but I don’t think there is a failure condition other than that you have to keep trying the music loop until you clear it to get to the next vignette. It’s sort of a wordless short story told through animated slides and deeply groovy musical interludes

Sorry about that, I’ve edited the correct link into the top post.

Here’s a Factorio mod that may intrigue you