Returning to Into the Breach was probably my highlight for August. I started a fresh game since I had been away for a long time and unlocked a bunch of squads. I played it quite a bit in Aug before moving on.
My second favorite has been Hard West 2. It is a nice combination of atmosphere and tactical combat. Since it wants the player to be a bit more aggressive than other games it feels like the battles play out a little faster.
Cuphead: I played at release and made it through part is Isle 2. Really great game but I’m not good enough at it. usually is I bang my head against challenging games long enough I make some progress, but progress really slowed down for me. I thought maybe I could make it a bit farther, but I can’t even get to where I made it the first time. I should play on easy mode just to see some of the other enemies - but I haven’t.
Slipways - I started a campaign and finally had a decent game where I got 2 or 3 stars. Sometimes I get decision paralysis since I don’t want to cut off access to a resource I want or I don’t see how to plan several moves ahead.
Out of the Park Baseball 23 : I avoided it for a while since it was a mess at release. I’m playing my traditional start of a historical 1978 league where I play as the Yankees. This time I have recalc turned off and the OOTP player development engine turned on so it will be a bit of a mystery how players develop over time - instead of them following history based on their performance each year.
Other games…
Two Point Campus: It didn’t take long before it felt repetitive. It happened much faster than Two Point Hospital (even though I never finished that campaign). TPC was fun for a couple of scenarios and worth playing on Gamepass.
Songs of Conquest: This is a good HOMM game, but I’m not sure I want to play a HOMM game anymore. A bit too much stuff on the map to pick up and visit. Also, I’m not a fam of its pixelated look. It is were a bit sharper it would look really nice.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits - Not a fan. It’s pretty, but everything else is just so-so for me.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Cursed to Golf yet. I’m pretty proud that I beat it on my fourth try but the rounds are so long that I haven’t fired it back up since.
I was taking my time but it said I took about seven hours to play 18 holes. Sheesh. Fun strategy/planning combined with platforming, power-ups, deckbuilding, and…golf.
I’m a noob Grim Dawn player and it’s been fun. Fifty hours, but all on my first character, and the story is already getting in the way. I’m looking forward to new characters but I neeeeed to max out my first first, and that’s getting tedious.
Wreckfest and Saints Row IV get honorable mention for the month.
Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, a 20-year-old Game Boy Advance game that never got an official English release, was supposed to just be my background time-filler for when I had 5 minutes to occupy with my phone. But even when I had free time and sat down in front of my main gaming setup, I’d pull it out during a loading screen and wind up playing “just one more turn” while the big TV sat idle. There’s something about the way this series handles fighting your way across maps, carefully analyzing enemy groupings to find the safest way to pick them apart, and growing your characters that’s just alchemically satisfying to me. I had loved FE7 (the prequel to this) back in the day, and returning to that world and sensibility was a delight, to the extent that after finishing it a couple days ago, I immediately dove back in on hard.
Also spent some time with Trials of the Dragon King, the first DLC for Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise. Feelings are a bit more mixed on this one. It adds a new weapon type, three jobs, and two boss fights, which are all solid enough, and a new difficulty mode. But no new main missions, no new enemy types, and no enemy placement variations in existing missions, all of which did a lot to make the Nioh games feel fresh after adding their DLC. And the new difficulty setting is heavily reliant on self-balancing, with needing me to both set the mission level and apply optional debuffs for greater rewards, which is a paradigm I’ve never been a fan of. All that said, the combat is still a lot of fun, and it was good to have a reason to dip back in for another dozen-odd hours and experiment with some new builds.
Never got to Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise, does the hero kill Chaos in it? If yes then what does he do in this DLC, he didn’t seem concerned about other things in life.
Listen it sounded like a good story about a man who wants to kill chaos. Pease tell me it ends well and he kills chaos and not some bullshit where he turns out to be chaos himself or something.
I guess for me this would be Hades, a game that (for me) is wildly better than its genre but perhaps not quite as good as its reputation. I largely enjoyed my time with it but you want to know a trope that’ll make me quit a game every time? Killing a final boss and having them spontaneously gain another, totally unannounced bar full of life.
Game of the month for me is Grim Dawn on the Xbox.
Oh man, am I addicted to this one and I think I’m enjoying the early game a lot more than Diablo III’s. Just has a good mix of flexibility with abilities/builds, action is tight, controller works well, challenge is just right on Veteran.
Only complaint I have is the slowdown that occurs when there’s a lot going on at once. I’m playing on the Series S, not sure if this is a problem on the X (didn’t notice this issue on my laptop, but I didn’t play it on there for too long). (Incidentally, been playing Titan Quest on a high end Android tablet and same thing with frame rate drops when action gets crazy).
And there’s maybe just a bit too much good and varied loot making it so I spend way too much time comparing stats instead of playing than I did in Diablo III, Torchlight II, and other ARPGs I’ve played.
Spider-Man Remastered for me all month. I’m just over halfway through the story and loving swinging through the city from task to task taking the stop here and there to clean up a crime in progress. Great fun!
I tasted a bunch of stuff with PS Plus Plus. I didn’t play too much of anything, but I’ll be going back for more Stray, Pile Up, Twials of Mana and Miles Morales. Shout out to Death End Request 2 for the really strange starting scenes. Shout out to Jumanji for being the worst game I played on there.
I finished Momodora 4. That was fun. I had to look up guides to see why I was getting a bad ending, and there’s no way I would’ve figured that out without one.
Yeah, it’s an exceptionally well designed action roguelike and I wouldn’t argue with anyone saying it’s the best in genre, but my biggest issue with it is that the final story beat took about 10 hours too long, by which point I was so ready for it to be over. And that’s a shame because I hear there’s loads after the credits but I just had no energy to pursue any of that in the end.
Yeah, to be honest I can’t even work up the energy to finish it and get to the credits. I appreciated that, after that loss to the end boss, there was some new stuff, but 5 or 6 runs later I’m still not past him and honestly, the game’s way too repetitive to continue to be worth playing. Credit to it for keeping my attention as long as it did, though, being as this is not my genre at all.
