This has been a weird month. Work has been really hectic and it's made me exhausted enough I've been jumping between games a lot. Nonetheless: there's some stuff!

• Mario RPG Remake: Finally finished this up. Really solid, really fun time. No regrets buying it. Yoko Shimomura knocks yet another remake soundtrack out of the park after the incredible Live a Live. Great stuff.
• Atelier Sophie 2: After a several-year break on Atelier I'm slowly getting back to this again. Like a lot of recent atelier games, it seems like it's more on the 60-hour side than the 40-hour the series used to be. Longggg. I still think it's going to end up one of my top reccs when I get around to updating my doc, but I have to decide whether to play Atelier Escha&Logy or Atelier Ryza 3 next after this and that's kind of a big choice. Hmm. We'll see!
• Tactical Nexus: I got back into this one bigtime for a little bit. It's a HUGE brain drain of a game and exhausting to play but succeeding is oh so satisfying, and I managed to get two new diamonds out of it. Feels really good. I think finally going for a moon medal on giant difficulty-wall nightmare Pop Tactical Lord is going to come up soon after I finish optimizing a few more chapter 1/2 levels, but man, that's a DAUNTING concept. Pop is so hideously complex. My brain... it hurts.
• Fallen London: I'm always playing fallen london, but the big new Firmament storyline combined with making some huge progress in Hurlers that finally led to me finishing the storyline have gotten me back into the game in a more serious way. Though, at the same time, the major content I have left to do dwindles by the day. Is this what it's like to be an endgame MMO player..? (FF14 doesn't count because I unsub the instant I stop playing it between expansions)
• Hades: I watched zandra play the hades 2 beta and it got me back into this again. RIP. I still have some story stuff to finish, after all.
• ZeroRanger: Finally got over being mad at this, got to the end, got mad again, beat it anyway. I liked it but it's definitely That kind of game.
• A bunch of very bad idle games yeah as usual when I'm super tired I'm playing a bunch of very bad idle games I found on reddit. They're all bad. I don't recommend any of them. I should find better games to play. I hate how succeptible I am to mechanical skinner boxessssss

• TerraScape: Fun little boardgamey tile placement game. IMO it ends up a bit less pretty than Dorfromantic, but it's way more satisfying to play. Very Number Go Up.
• Hitman World of Assassination: I've been back in hard on roguelike mode and comprehensively playing the first two games' campaigns has made me WAY better at it than I previously was. I should get around to game 3 sometime but I think I kinda burned myself out writing those two huge posts, lmao. Oh well! Game's still fun
• Car Mechanic Simulator 2021: A classic podcast/relaxation game for me, I've been zonking to this lately when tired. It's just satisfying screwing and unscrewing stuff. It just is
• Mimic Logic: "What if someone somehow glued procgen "one of us only lies, one of us only tells the truth" puzzle to a dungeon crawler" is not what I expected to be an incredibly compelling setup, but this RPG maker thing is surprisingly fun. Enter rooms full of chests and try not to open the ones that are actually lying mimics. Beat up monsters with the items in the non-mimic chests. It's pretty cute!!
• Expeditions: A Mudrunner game: I've been playing this slowly. It's fun! It's hard! It's Car Suffering(TM). I hope the initial negative reception doesn't put them off continuing to grow it, because it's a blast.
• Unicorn Overlord: Vanillaware made a real good systems-based tactical RPG! I'm so on the fence if I need to up the difficulty level to max for my first playthrough - it's a bit on the easy side - but it's pretty refreshing to play something in this space that isn't either tactics ogre or fire emblem. Story's forgettable but that's fine.
• High Seas Saga DX: This de-F2P'd kairosoft game mostly really feels a lot like a free to play game still. I'm not sure how I feel about it. But it's a cute idea and plays NOTHING like the rest of their games, which in and of itself is very rare.
• Pacific Drive: I finished this a week or two ago. WHAT A BLAST. Huge, huge recommend, I loved every moment of it. If you like the idea of a run based lite-horror/crafting game with a surprisingly good plot, GET ON THIS
• Shiren 6: Continues to be a great classical mystery dungeon roguelike. Man the (HUGE AMOUNT of) postgame stuff is hard, I'm getting my ass kicked.

I need to get back to Astlibra Gaiden but I marathoned the game soooo hard and needed a break. Lovely stuff tho.

• Sonic Frontiers
  I could write an entire post on this game but it's an amazing combination of some of the most fun sonic gameplay in ages and the most confused design sonic has ever had. Huge amounts of interesting bespoke content meet confused, unpolished cutscenes and minigames meet a fun story with some of the worst voice acting sonic has ever had. It is a game of contrasts. It might be one of the best sonic games released since generations. It's also a mess. That's sonic frontiers
• Crop Rotation: Picked this up on launch sale. It's real neat! "Luck be a landlord" roguelike run where you are crushed inevitably by rising rent, except it's farming. Maybe a little too forgiving at times but it's a blast.
• Atelier Sophie 2: I like this game a lot but I think I might be long-term burned out on atelier right now.... rip me
• 50 different idle games on my phone: Why am I still doing this??????
• FF7 Ever Crisis: This game is kind of bad but in a way where it's so expensive that journalists would get reamed for saying so. It's a tedious gacha with a lot of fancy art. I hate it. But also I want a recap of dirge of cerberus so I'm playing it anyway
• Monster Hunter Now: Super minimalist monster hunter pokemon go. Solid combat uplifts a otherwise barely-there game. Fun in bite size increments moreso than lengthy walks. We'll see if I stick with it.

• Terra Nil - Okay so I started this during IGF so I've already seen a bunch of it so I'm going kinda slow on my replay. Still love this tho. It's so FUNDAMENTALLY different from the rest of the sim genre. I'm kind of hoping this encourages others to think about what else you can make in the space that isn't just citybuilders - as much as I love citybuilders!
• Sunless Skies - Finally mustered myself to beat this. What a good game. I'd forgotten how much it improved on Sunless Seas' UI until I saw zandra play the latter a bit. I really, really hope failbetter makes another one of these sometime, because there's so little like them out there. In the meantime, there's always another run, and also...
• Fallen London - I'm trying it out again. I'm not a F2P person by any means but while in 2014 the game seemed like it constantly wanted me to pay money it seems downright generous compared to the exploitative gachas that define the genre on mobile now. It's fun so far but I feel like I'm awful at it. Maybe that's the intended experience. Anyway time to get exiled to the tomb-colonies again
• Get In The Car, Loser! - Played through DLC2 recently. Still a great game that I feel was seriously overlooked by basically the entirety of games - only 50 reviews on steam is seriously dire. Trans as fuck, queer as hell. The music's great, the dlc is a really solid extension of the main campaign, the game has a lot to say about modern fascism. Seriously, yall need to play it
• Hypnospace Outlaw - playing this at my friends' place and it's maybe the best group experience imaginable. What an incredible love letter to the 90s internet, and one that's surprisingly immediately relevant-feeling when you look at the way modern twitter is collapsing. Also tons of incredible music. I will never ever get the granny cream song out of my head.
• Snowrunnner - My new podcast game. Between this and Death Stranding i've become extremely into the 'genre' of "getting around, but it's hard". Really, really smart design in this one, I'm super impressed at how much flexibility it feels like it has. There's never Not an option, if you're willing to put in the effort.

Small Bits

• Hitman WOA - Roguelike mode continues to alternately consume and destroy me. One day I'll beat it so I can join the winners' club with @ticky.
• Atelier Sophie 2 - I've been getting back to it, if only because ryza 3 is out so I'm late af on it. Still on track to be my new top recc on the atelier doc tbh
• Orb of Creation - Me getting back into idle games is usually a bad sign but this one's pretty solid so far. Very active, not really much in the way of idling. Which is maybe why everyone likes it so much.
• Grimrock 2 - chugging along on this but starting to remember why I fell off. I love grimrock but it can be a slogggg sometimes. Esp when you're not sure where to go.
• Urbek City Builder - Strange but entertaining puzzly citybuilder with the unusual distinction of allowing you to build up anarchist communes, among other things. I love a good weird eurosim.
• Labyrinth of Galleria - backburnered because it's literally a 100+ hour jrpg. Love you galleria but you're SO LONG