writer (derogatory). lead designer on Fallen London.
http://twitter.com/notbrunoagain
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So I'm putting Lorelei and the Laser eyes on hold for a bit until I feel like making a push through that game's ending, and I've tried Skald: Against the Black Priory but I don't think it's grabbing me.
So, once again: Cohost, what have you been playing? I'm as always more interested in hearing about recent releases.
Some friends and I are going through Abiotic Factor. It's an interesting one—a survival crafting game in a purely man-made environment, with little to no procgen (as far as I can tell). You're a scientist in legally-distinct Black Mesa trying to survive after a legally-distinct resonance cascade.
I'm still making my mind up about how I really feel about it, but I like exploring the facility and working my way up the tech tree. I'm also a big stupid Half-Life nerd so, y'know, there's a lot of little nods that are laser-targeted at me.
Been playing Dream Tactics. It's a neat little tactics RPG where you deckbuild tiny 10 card decks across your 4+ party members, and bounce around different worlds. Every character has little mechanical interactions. Your rabbit knight, one of the main characters, can stack Carrots on herself, granting a luck (crit) bonus. She has a moves that scale off this, like a cleave that on crit, refunds itself, or a big thrust that grows the more Carrots she has.
Your MC is a sleep mage, so her deal's making enemies drowsy/putting them to sleep, then has stuff that plays off that.
Your cav, a dog-girl on a slime, has a stance system.
I found a pyromancer who wants to be on fire to extend her range/set the battlefield on fire.
It's great.
I've really been enjoying Nine Sols which a deflection-based metroidvania using a tao/sci-fi setting with horror elements (taopunk, as the developers describe it ). I don't think there's another game out there doing what it's doing!
I found Botany Manor to be a delightful diversion for a couple hours. Hard? No. But cute and focused.
Currently playing Cryptmaster which is certainly novel and impressive (especially in the age of LLMs, knowing it isn't using one), but hasn't quite entirely grabbed me.
Pepper Grinder is "what if Ecco the Dolphin was actually playable" and that rules, despite the very Ecco-like collision bugs and physics glitches :D
Final Profit. Made by a fellow Cohoster. It has sunk its "Rewarding exploring" and "lots of systems to make numbers go up in different ways" and "mix of light hearted goofy humor with a bit of bite satire of capitalism."
Pampas & Selene: The Maze of Demons in co-op with a buddy. Pixelly sidescrolly castle exploration and combat game with a lot of very clever co-op features, like a little picture-in-picture when your partner is on another screen, and the ability to teleport to your partner's side at any time. Had both of us going "yeeAAAaaaah" as we played; looking forward to our next session with it.
Path of Achra for me. A combat-centric roguelike that focuses on broken builds. If you like theorycrafting, it's a ton of fun, but fair warning that its appeal doesn't extend too far beyond that.
I've been playin' the TTYD remake, which is really good! That game's humor holds up incredibly well, and the combat is still really fun. It's definitely a reminder of how old JRPGs had annoyingly obscure secrets and loved to waste your time with backtracking, but that's got a certain charm to it in this day and age.
I stopped doing the trouble requests (except the one that gets you a new partner) after I realized they were all jokes about how annoying sidequests are. Super Paper Mario has the reputation for lots of metacommentary in its design, but there's some in TTYD too!
Recent releases, you say...
Indika, because that’s my corner of the world’s special kind of surreal horror (which also is the reason for its Pathologic vibes, and I just can’t miss anything remotely resembling Pathologic), and mixed-medium little games-within-the-game look interesting as a narrative device.
As for not-so-recent, I'm currently recommending The Mooseman to everyone. Some indie games just don't get old.
